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were there any French troops in Normandy invasion? | Always room for more, but as a starting point there's [a thread from a couple of years back] (_URL_0_) where /u/k1990 covers ground units and I chip in a bit about the naval and air forces. | [
"By the time of the Normandy Invasion, the Free French forces numbered more than 400,000 strong. 900 Free French paratroopers landed as part of the British Special Air Service (SAS) Brigade; the 2e Division Blindée (2nd Armoured Division or 2e DB)—under General Leclerc—landed at Utah Beach in Normandy on 1 August 1... |
how do darknet dealers get drugs like cocaine and heroin in the first place? | The same way traditional drug dealers do. From producers, or importers (who get them from producers). The drug supply chain does not change, what changes is how the product gets to the end user.
Think of it like Amazon vs a general store. They both buy products from suppliers and wholesalers but they retail the products very differently. | [
"Cocaine traffickers from Colombia, and recently Mexico, have also established a labyrinth of smuggling routes throughout the Caribbean, the Bahama Island chain, and South Florida. They often hire traffickers from Mexico or the Dominican Republic to transport the drug. The traffickers use a variety of smuggling tec... |
whats the difference between sorting by best and sorting by top? | Top: Highest score (Upvotes - Downvotes = Score)
Best: [This is more complicated](_URL_0_). It takes all the current votes on a post as a sample and gives it a score that it is 95% confident it will end up with, given infinite time.
Essentially, it prevents older posts with a higher score (simply because they were posted earlier) from pushing newer, popular posts all the way to the bottom of the page. | [
"In computer science, selection sort is a sorting algorithm, specifically an in-place comparison sort. It has O(\"n\") time complexity, making it inefficient on large lists, and generally performs worse than the similar insertion sort. Selection sort is noted for its simplicity, and it has performance advantages ov... |
How do eyestalks (such as on slugs) work? How do they retract and extend? | They inflate them with their haemolymph (or bodily fluid), and they have a retractor muscle, that when contracted, withdraws the tentacle. | [
"Eyestalks are a specialized type of tentacle. Tentacles may also have olfactory organs at their ends. Examples of creatures with olfactory tentacles include snails, the trilobite superfamily Asaphida, and the fly family Diopsidae. In slugs and snails, these tentacles will regrow if severely damaged, and in some sp... |
How do we know the difference between good and bad? | Its usually based on the frame of reference and other people. People are conditioned to think something is good or bad based on what they were taught as children. Therefore some people who grew up with parents who enjoy AC/DC think classical rock is better than hip/hop, so on so forth | [
"Good and evil are seen as inherent to human nature because they are both manifestations of our pursuit of perfection. \"Good\" things come from the use of intellect while \"bad\" things come from the prevalence of instinct.\n",
"The distinction of evil from 'bad' is complex. Evil is more than simply 'negative' o... |
Did the Rosenbergs committ espionage or was it an unfair trial during a period of fear? | Julius was a confirmed spy. There is really no doubt about that at this point.
Ethel's involvement seems much more marginal and unclear. She knew what Julius was doing, but she didn't seem to be an active participant.
As for the trial, it was both somewhat unfair and somewhat botched. The government's public case revolved entirely around testimony of Ethel's brother, David Greenglass. The Greenglass testimony was never adequately cross-examined, and the Rosenbergs' attorney did a pretty lousy job of dealing with the evidence in question. (Why? I suspect he had no idea what to do and was very intimidated by the technical aspects. The government declassified the idea of implosion _specifically_ to use it as evidence in the Rosenberg trial. The Rosenbergs' attorney, instead of bringing in experts to ask whether Greenglass' crude sketch was very valuable or not, instead argued [that the declassified drawing should be impounded into court record so that nobody else could see it.](_URL_0_) Whatever he was trying to accomplish by that, it didn't work.)
Greenglass himself later admitted to perjuring himself (to implicate Ethel more strongly) in order to cut a deal with regards to his own wife. All of this could have come out with decent lawyering by the defense, but it didn't.
The government's _secret_ case, via the VENONA intercepts, was much stronger. But this could not be introduced into evidence without compromising the source. Hence the reliance on Greenglass. (And Harry Gold, who is another complicated character.)
Did the Rosenbergs deserve their sentence? Maybe Julius, if you're into capital punishment for this sort of thing. Ethel, probably not. But one also has to ask, given what we know today, why both of them were willing to go to their graves for having spied for Stalin, when they both knew that if they cooperated with the government they'd have been given lighter sentences. The entire point of the capital punishment charge was to coerce them into cooperating, and they pushed it as far as they could. This despite having two children. One wonders what fueled this devotion to their cause.
The question of anti-Semitism sometimes comes up. I would suggest that it played a role in the media discussion of the trial (many of the stories on the trial were full of racial innuendo, with an undue focus on the defendants' corpulence and physical passion), but that in terms of actual judicial conduct, it's not so clear. The prosecutor (Irving Saypol) and the judge (Irving Kaufman) were both Jewish (which doesn't necessarily prove anything, but does countermand the assertion that it was some kind of WASP conspiracy). The government's case was, we now know, based on pretty firm evidence, although they did not introduce that into court. I don't really see any evidence that anti-Semitism played a huge role in the actual prosecution of the matter. The accusations of anti-Semitism were part of the pro-Rosenberg campaign that was largely orchestrated by the Communist Party at the time. The CP had a wonderful tradition of trying to create martyrs to their cause, something which had a long-term, devastating effect on Leftist politics in the United States.
As for the actual value of the Rosenberg's information to the USSR, the atomic bomb work passed on by Greenglass was of minimal importance. At most it confirmed that some of the other spy data the Soviets were getting wasn't totally made-up, but even if they hadn't existed, there were other spies (e.g. Ted Hall) who could have served the same function, and in any case, the Soviets didn't swallow the espionage without vetting it anyway. Their spying on other war technology (e.g. the proximity fuze) might have been more consequential. Greenglass had too basic an understanding of the atomic bomb work to be a very good spy of it.
It's worth noting, perhaps, that the spy Klaus Fuchs, who gave the Soviets _much_ more useful and detailed information about American and British nuclear developments, over a much longer timespan, was sentenced to a maximum of 14 years in prison in the UK, and then let out after 9 years to emigrate to East Germany. Why such a light sentence? In part because he cooperated, but also because in the UK, they distinguish between spying on an ally and spying on an enemy — the USSR was, after all, an ally during the Manhattan Project, and only later became an adversary. Just a side note on comparative approaches to espionage. | [
"For decades, the Rosenbergs' sons, Michael and Robert Meeropol, and many other defenders maintained that Julius and Ethel were innocent of spying on their country and were victims of Cold War paranoia. After the fall of the Soviet Union, much information concerning them was declassified, including a trove of decod... |
I have to complete a research essay on African history before 1800 and need a good essay topic. Any ideas? | What aspects of history are you interested in? Economic history? Religious history? Urbanization? State-building? The interaction between culturese (Europeans or Arab world interacting with African cultures)? The "Great African States" like Mali, Songhai, Bornu, Kush, Zimbabwe or Aksum? | [
"Cheikh Anta Diop wrote a series of essays as a student from 1946 to 1960, charting the development of Africa. The essays, which are seen as a form of blueprint, are collected in book form as \"Towards the African Renaissance: Essays in Culture and Development, 1946-1960\".\n",
"Several of the essays caution agai... |
Can someone give me a quick overview of how the Caliphates transitioned into one another? | Is this a homework question? If not, could you please provide a little bit more information about what you're looking for? | [
"The caliphate arose out of the death of Muhammad in 632 CE and the subsequent debate over the succession to his leadership. Abu Bakr, a close companion of Muhammad from the Banu Taym clan, was elected the first Rashidun leader and began the conquest of the Arabian Peninsula. He ruled from 632 to his death in 634. ... |
can we really clean pesticide off fruit by just rinsing them off? wouldn't that mean rain would rinse it off all the time? | You're not cleaning off the pesticide. You're cleaning off dirt and other toxins that may have stuck to the wax they put on the fruit to make it shiny.
Pesticides stick to the fruit, but they are also absorbed by the plant and end up within the flesh of the fruit. | [
"OP pesticide exposure occurs through inhalation, ingestion and dermal contact. Because OP pesticides degrade quickly when exposed to air and light, they have been considered relatively safe to consumers. However, OP residues may linger on fruits and vegetables. Certain OP pesticides have been banned for use on som... |
What kind of atoms are present in a vacuum? | _URL_0_
> Of the gas in the ISM, 89% of atoms are hydrogen and 9% are helium, with 2% of atoms being elements heavier than hydrogen or helium, which are called "metals" in astronomical parlance | [
"In the presence of electromagnetic vacuum modes, the combined atom-vacuum system is explained by the superposition of the wavefunctions of the excited state atom with no photon and the ground state atom with a single emitted photon:\n",
"Vacuum is useful in a variety of processes and devices. Its first widesprea... |
how does illiteracy work? | Can you elaborate on what you mean? Because illiteracy is the natural state of humans. | [
"BULLET::::- Functional illiteracy: Refers to the inability of an individual to use reading, speaking, writing, and computational skills efficiently in everyday life situations. Unlike an illiterate, a functionally illiterate adult could be able to read and write text in his native language (with a variable degree ... |
What actually happens when a computer, server, or phone crashes? | This is an extremely broad question. It depends on what the device is, what it's purpose is, and what the problem is. There are so many possibilities it is quite difficult to list them all. Here are some examples though:
**Soda machine stopped giving soda.** The [embedded computer](_URL_3_) in a vending machine is very tiny, and for the most part, very stupid. It can tell which soda you want based on what button you pressed, and it tells the machine which can to release. It also gives you change. But that's it. It can't do anything else. This kind of computer is most likely built on a single chip on a single circuit board. It does not have an operating system--just some code that continuously runs. If there are any mistakes in this software, it will "crash", or just stop working because the code confused itself. It will have to be manually reset. This usually means the computer is stuck in an infinite loop or is trying to do two things at the same time and simply can't. For example, an especially poorly designed system will become confused when you press two soda buttons at the same time, and will be forever stuck trying to decide which one to give you first. Or, when trying to calculate change, a bug in the code says to return zero coins when it has already been determined that *some* change is required. However, the software is already waiting for coins to be dispensed before releasing a soda, so it becomes stuck.
**Your laptop just blue screened.** This means Windows (or whatever) detected a problem so bad that it can't fix it. This usually means that some device (say, an external hard drive) just tried to do something that is not allowed, like forgetting to give control of some important data back to the OS. The [OS panics](_URL_4_), and shuts down immediately to try to prevent further damage, such as the external hard drive grabbing even more important data. Alternatively, there may be something very bad happening to the hardware, like the CPU is way too hot or something is short-circuiting. Again, the system "crashes" in an effort to preserve itself. Less extreme crashes are caused by programs not responding. This is almost universally caused by programming mistakes. As an example, your internet browser and a game are both trying to control your audio output (even though they should work together). [Both are stuck](_URL_6_) trying to send data to the resource, but neither of them ever do because they are waiting for the other to do the same thing. They both "crash".
**The Curiosity rover on Mars just froze.** This is a Pretty Bad Thing. No computer tech can go out and press the reset button. This is why just about everything that has ever traveled into space has two identical computers, so that one can keep chugging along and reset the other when there is a problem ([link,](_URL_1_) [link](_URL_0_)). Usually computer problems in space are caused either by tricky, unexpected circumstances in software, or hardware damage due to radiation. NASA goes balls to the wall when testing their code, and try to account for every possible thing that can go wrong. However, things happen. The rover might detect it is about to do something potentially dangerous, stops, and goes into safe mode. This is the space-equivalent of blue-screening. Alternatively, a cosmic ray (or other form of radiation) may [flip a bit in computer memory](_URL_5_). This causes unexpected errors and is currently a [big problem to work around](_URL_2_). For example, the engineers may have inserted a piece of code limiting the rover's speed to 10 cm/s. Theoretically, a flipped bit could change this to 10,000 cm/s. Even worse, a hard coded limit on the maximum limit of rotation on Curiosity's robotic arm could be changed from 90° to 900°. Any attempt to park the arm or use it could permanently damage the arm or its motors. Hence, the rover's memory is scanned for such errors continuously.
**edit:** links
| [
"In computing, a crash, or system crash, occurs when a computer program such as a software application or an operating system stops functioning properly and exits. The program responsible may appear to hang until a crash reporting service reports the crash and any details relating to it. If the program is a critica... |
Finding the potential power a city may produce if it had installed solar PV panels in a certain capacity? | %solar PV efficiency (eg. 18-22% is typical for consumer installations). You can multiply irradiance by this number to get the amount of energy produced and multiply this by surface area of solar PV to get the total energy consumption per hour.
Most statistics provide solar PV installation as Wh values, which isn't helpful for this method of calculation. I'm not sure how you'd climb that hurdle.
You might also want to find a solar PV adoption rate so that you can change the surface area of PV with time. | [
"On May 27, 2015, the service contract of the largest solar PV power plant in the country has been approved by the Department of Energy (DOE). The P7-billion worth 100 MW Solar PV project in the city of Ilagan is designed to reduce the current shortage in electricity that causes regular blackouts that results to in... |
how do the genetics of three-parent children work? | We usually just think of our DNA as just being stored in the nucleus, but that's not the case. The vast majority is there, but some organelles also have their own, unique DNA. That's actually the basis of one of the theories on how we came to develop organelles, endosymbiotic theory. Basically, it's the idea that some/many of our organelles, like mitochondria, were originally separate single celled organisms, which were then essentially devoured or merged into what would become eukaryotes.
Anyway, the third parent in this situation donates an egg, which contains mitochondria and various other organelles, but has had its nucleus removed. Then the nucleus of an egg from the other female parent is placed inside it, and sperm containing DNA from a third parent is added.
AFAIK, it's always been two women, one man so far, but you should be able to perform the procedure with any three people. It would just involve additional steps to move the DNA around into sperm cells or eggs or whatever. | [
"In fertilization and breeding experiments (and especially when discussing Mendel's laws) the parents are referred to as the \"P\" generation and the offspring as the \"F1\" (first filial) generation. When the F1 offspring mate with each other, the offspring are called the \"F2\" (second filial) generation. One of ... |
what computer language is artificial intelligence written in and is it enough? | One computer language is equivalent to another in terms of what they *can* do, but AI has historically been associated with Lisp, Prolog, Java, C, and Python. There's no reason you can't do it in whatever language you want, of course. | [
"Artificial intelligence in modern terms generally refers to computer systems that mimic human cognitive functions, that encompasses, independent learning or problem solving in particular. While this type of general artificial intelligence has not yet been achieved, most contemporary Artificial Intelligence project... |
Race & Slavery in Brazil | I would recommend Chica da Silva: A Brazilian Slave of the Eighteenth Century by Júnia Ferreira Furtado as a good place to start along with Inhuman Bondage by David Brion Davis (He devotes a chapter specifically to Brazil).
I think a film that really bears out what Robinson was getting at is City of God. If you have ever watched the film, the characters that are involved in criminal activity are almost all black and there is even an attempt by Benny, one of the drug dealers, to whiten himself (dying his hair, wearing American clothes, and wanting to be a farmer) when he decides to leave the criminal enterprise. Basically, there are evident racial divisions in Brazil no matter what any narrative might say otherwise. | [
"Brazil took in the most slaves of any country in the Americas and was the last to outlaw slavery in 1888. Afro-Brazilians and their descendants have faced discrimination and many live in poverty. Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva made addressing the issues a priority.\n",
"Today, there are more than 75 million people of... |
how can businesses like airbrush booths use licensed icons, logos, or characters legally? | They don't.
For instance all that Calvin and Hobb's stuff, everything made is stolen, no merch has ever been liscenced. | [
"Brand licenses are a contractual agreement where a company lets another organisation use its brand on other products in exchange for a licensing fee. An example of brand licensing is seen in the Walt Disney Company's relationship to Tokyo Disneyland. The theme park is owned by The Oriental Land Company, which lice... |
what is at stake in the us senate filibuster by ted cruz that has been going on all evening? | He is attempting to make a point about how serious he feels it is to oppose the Affordable Care Act, and holding up the business of the Senate, but other work can proceeded elsewhere and he is not preventing any votes from being held. This can not effect the Affordable Care Act itself, as that is already law. It is purely a symbolic stance. The only thing at stake appears to be his dignity. | [
"BULLET::::- September 24–25, 2013: Senator Ted Cruz delivered a 21-hour, 19-minute speech, one of the longest in Senate history, in opposition to the Affordable Care Act. Cruz's speech was not a filibuster, as it delayed no vote.\n",
"The first of three scheduled debates between O'Rourke and Ted Cruz took place ... |
If the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate, where exactly does that expansion happen? At the space between the atoms in my body, or somewhere else? | So we have two types of movement here. One is movement through space and the other is a stretching of the fabric of space itself. The common analogy is an ant on a rubber band. The ant walking on the band is traveling through space but stretching the band with an ant on either end will still result in them moving apart even if they are standing still on the surface.
Now the molecules in your body are stuck together very strongly. As space stretches they will slide through space and stay stuck together. In fact even gravity between galaxies is strong enough to keep galaxies stuck together, but now the stretching of the material they are on is perceptible so on average we notice things moving a bit faster away from each other or slower towards each other.
The only place the stretching of space dominates so that objects on it are actually all moving away is at the super galactic cluster scale. These are the largest structures in the universe.
edit: the bonus of why is two parts. The mechanism behind it is currently unknown. The fundamental reason behind it is that it is just the nature of the Universe we find ourselves in. | [
"The expansion of the universe reaches an infinite degree in finite time, causing expansion to accelerate without bounds. This acceleration necessarily passes the speed of light (since it involves expansion of the universe itself, not particles moving within it), causing more and more objects to leave our observabl... |
Why when welding metals are alloys other than the parent material used? | You're confusing welding and brazing/soldering. With brazing or soldering a different material is used to join parts composed of another material. For example, you might use a tin based solder to make a physical and electrical connection between two contacts made out of copper. Welding is different, the primary action of welding is heat. In blacksmithing welding is done by taking two pieces of steel, heating them up to welding temperature, adding some flux to the welding area, and then hammering the pieces together, forming a weld.
In welding it's the heat that creates the join, not the material added. The addition of new metal in the process of welding is a side effect of the process and is merely a mechanism for the heat to penetrate into the join and cause those pieces to join together. Indeed, there are ways to weld that do not add additional material, such as friction stir welding or oxy-acetylene/MAPP welding without using filler. Also, if you weld two pieces together and then completely grind off the new material then you still can have a strong weld. The strength of the weld comes from the original material joining together due to heat, not from the added material. | [
"Welding is a process where different pieces of metal are fused together to create different shapes and designs. There are many different forms of welding, such as Oxy-fuel welding, Stick welding, MIG welding, and TIG welding. Oxy-fuel is probably the most common method of welding when it comes to creating steel sc... |
What psychological differences are there between adults and young adults? | The same question came up recently on a podcast I download, when discussing frontal lobe brain damage and development.The quick answer I found is from [here](_URL_0_).
"...the nerve cells that connect teenagers' frontal lobes with the rest of their brains are sluggish. Teenagers don't have as much of the fatty coating called myelin, or "white matter," that adults have in this area."
Maybe this is more a neurological explanation than you were looking for. | [
"Researchers believe and have frequently reported that older individuals are more likely to be in an achieved identity status than younger people. Evidence shows that increasing age and a wide range of life experiences helps individuals develop cognitive skills. This combination of age, life experiences, and improv... |
Homework in American Schools? | Well firstly I can point you in the direction for homework from the 19th Century.
_URL_0_
The library of the uni of Pittsburg has digitised it's collection. This is a collection of schoolbooks from that period, it would include any homework given. | [
"Historically, homework was frowned upon in American culture. With few students interested in higher education, and due to the necessity to complete daily chores, homework was discouraged not only by parents, but also by school districts. In 1901, the California legislature passed an act that effectively abolished ... |
what is a "flathead v8"? | Flathead engines are ones where the valves are placed in the engine block, alongside the pistons. Compare to overhead valve engines, where it's up top.
V8 means it has 8 pistons arranged in two sets of four, which meet at an acute angle, making a "V" shape. | [
"A flathead engine, otherwise sidevalve engine, is an internal combustion engine with its poppet valves contained within the engine block, instead of in the cylinder head, as in an overhead valve engine.\n",
"The Ford flathead V8 (often called simply the Ford flathead, flathead Ford, or flatty when the context is... |
short selling | Suppose I want to make a bit of money and you lend me your car to do so. I could sell the car to somebody for $120,000 (Nice car!) and in a few months buy it back from them. Since they have been using the car for a while it has done more kilometers/miles so I only pay $100,000. I still have to give the car back to you but have made an extra $20,000.
Short selling is exactly this process but instead of a car you are dealing with shares in a company and they are borrowed from a broker. Short selling also only works if the value decreases. For example, what would happen if the person I sold your car to installed a brand new engine, wheels and wanted $150,000 for me to buy it back? | [
"The term \"short sale\" is a misnomer because it has nothing to do with shorting anything in the financial sense. These transactions can also take a significant amount of time so it is not called a \"short sale\" for that reason either. However, the process is shorter than the traditional process of going through ... |
options and "buy to open," "buy to close," "sell to open," "sell to close." | Options are a deal between two people, where one person pays the other for the opportunity to take an action later. Because they're a deal, we could create a brand new option from nothing (our agreement creates it) or we can trade our position in an already existing option. The exchange tracks all the options so that the final owners can follow through when the time comes for the agreement to end.
Buying and selling to open means you want to create a new option. Buying to open means you'll pay money now to have the option to do something later. Selling to open means you'll get money now but be on the hook to fulfill the option's rules if the buyer wishes to do so in the future.
Buying and selling to close means you're trading your portion of an already existing option to someone else. Buying to close means you were paid money to create an option, and now you're paying someone else to take your place for the remaining time. Selling to close means you were the payer previously and now you'll receive money from someone who want's to take your place as the person who can take the action for the remaining time. | [
"A buy–sell agreement, also known as a buyout agreement, is a legally binding agreement between co-owners of a business that governs the situation if a co-owner dies or is otherwise forced to leave the business, or chooses to leave the business.\n",
"Closing is a sales term which refers to the process of making a... |
why dont they make a usb connected laptop charger? | They did, and they have. The primary reason usb wasn't used is because people are prone to killing their usb cables by constantly putting it in the wrong way, that's just the last thing you want from a cable. But, with the advent of USB-C quite a few laptops and monitors have been popping up that have a usb-c port which is just stellar because i can use my charger for my Nexus 6p
The laptop I'm currently using that has it is a chromebook acer 14 for work. | [
"Some non-standard USB devices use the 5 V power supply without participating in a proper USB network, which negotiates power draw with the host interface. These are usually called \"USB decorations\". Examples include USB-powered keyboard lights, fans, mug coolers and heaters, battery chargers, miniature vacuum cl... |
is it true that vaping marijuana with vaporizers such as the volcano make weed completely safe for the lungs? | There is an insufficient amount of clinical data to answer this question with any level of confidence; vaping is a relatively new technology, and the negative effects of smoking are most prominent decades after first use.
Anyone who answers this question with any more confidence than that is at best oversimplifying and at worst making stuff up.
As far as the potential effects...it may be better for you than smoking, but it also may be worse. There are certainly chemicals present in normally smoked marijuana that don't become airborne when vaping, which certainly suggests potential health benefits. However, it is also possible that the high temperature with normal smoking denatures potentially harmful inhalants, which remain intact during vaping and could have far-reaching health effects. We simply don't know right now. | [
"Cannabinoid-enriched e-liquids require lengthy, complex processing, some being readily available online despite lack of quality control, expiry date, conditions of preservation, or any toxicological and clinical assessment. It is assumed that vaporizing cannabinoids at lower temperatures is safer because it produc... |
is the concept of light speed defined by light itself, or does light just want to go infinitely fast but physics puts a cap on it? | As far as we know, it's the second one. Particles with no mass travel as fast as physics allows anything to travel. Since photons are the massless particles that we encounter most often, we first encountered that maximum speed by observing light and we called that speed "the speed of light". | [
"In Galilean relativity, it was considered \"obvious\" that we could add speeds without limit (\"w\" = \"u\" + \"v\"). This composition laws for speed was not challenged. However, Poincaré and Einstein did challenge it with special relativity, setting a maximum speed on movement, the speed of light. Formally, if \"... |
why don't networks like espn put their field reporters on a split second tape delay to remove the awkward pauses between a question and answer? | Because, if they did, there would be the same awkward pause between the field reporter's response and the next question.
The only way around it is to edit the pauses out before putting the segment to air. But you can't do that live. | [
"Sideline reporters are restricted as to whom they can speak to and when (usually a head coach at halftime, and one or two players before and after the game ends). Information on injured players or rules interpretations are relayed from NFL off-field officials to the TV producers in the truck, who then pass it alon... |
Did people during the 1700s ever try to imagine life in the year 1800s? | Hi there! Sorry it took me a few days to answer you. I needed to dig up a bunch of old notes to refresh my memory.
So yes, 18th century social theorists had a strong sense of futurism. In a broad sense an intellectual concern with the future had existed since the Renaissance rediscovery of Europe’s Classical heritage, which provided the West with a new sense of time’s passage that inevitably looked to the future as well as the past. Coupled with the Protestant Reformation and the Scientific Revolution, by the time the 18th century came around there was an understanding that time was not only changing, but malleable, and that humans could influence events and make their future better.
This really comes across in Enlightenment intellectual discourse, which emphasizes science, reason, toleration, and education as the means by which to establish a better future. During the 18th century there is a very self-conscious movement amongst social elites (noble or otherwise) to put these ideas into practice in order to become more culturally “enlightened” than their neighbours. It’s from this that we get the phenomenon of [enlightened despotism]( _URL_2_). For example, King Fredrick II of Prussia and the Russian Empress Catherine II both conducted extended personal correspondences with the French thinker Voltaire, taking input from him in how to govern their countries in a way that aligned with humanists ideals.
While the effectiveness of their policies are a subject of debate, there’s no question that this sort of intellectual and political atmosphere led to plenty of speculation about what the future held. What follows are couple key people from the century whose work dealt implicitly with questions of the future. I’m afraid I’m not a real expert on any of these individuals but you can certainly take a quick look at what they contributed to discussions of the future and possibly read more into those that interest you!
[Giambattista Vico](_URL_0_) (1668-1744): Here’s a man who this subreddit owes a lot to. He argued that the study of history was just as important as the study of human nature, as any account of human achievement is necessarily a historical account. Context is key to the understanding of history as human values and concerns are always evolving. He paved the way for Hegel and Marx to argue for the close interrelationship of all aspects of society, with politics, economics, and art all depending on one another as history moves forward.
[Montesquieu]( _URL_5_) (1689-1755): Applied the scientific idea of causation to history. A good quote that puts this in perspective is: *“If a particular cause, like the accidental result of a battle, has ruined a state, there was a general cause which made the downfall of this state ensue from a single battle.”* His *Spirit of Laws* published in 1748 was a monumental attempt to compare different human societies and institutions, it was a sort of political anthropology that can be seen as the predecessor of modern cultural and social anthropology. He categorized different government types and analyzed government functions, concluding with a strong argument for the need of checks and balances for future governments.
[Nicolas de Condorcet](_URL_3_) (1743-1794): Set out to describe human history in terms of the progress of science, explicitly relating it to progress in areas such as human rights by suggesting a Newtonian law of causality between science and humanism. The growth of knowledge in the natural and social sciences would lead to justice, freedom, prosperity, and moral improvement and history is patterned upon the progressive development of human capabilities. Social evils arise from ignorance and error, not from human nature. Condorcet was extremely influential and helped to make the idea of “progress” a central concern of European civilization throughout the 19th century.
[Lousi Sebastian Mercier](_URL_1_) (1740-1814): This might be a little more what you were thinking of in when you originally asked this question, as he published a book called *The Year 2440* which described a utopian Paris. He intended for the book to be both a scathing criticism of Revolutionary Paris and simultaneously a “guide book for the future”.
[Jonathan swift](_URL_7_) (1667-1745): Another writer who used ideas of exploring strange lands and distant futures to satirize European society. One of his utopian depictions described a society of researchers governed by reason, which is pretty much the goal of promoters of the enlightenment like Voltaire.
[Mary Wollstonecraft] (_URL_6_) (1759-1797): Wollstonecraft was an early feminist who published the incredible *Vindication on the Rights of Women* in 1792 that was deeply concerned with the place of women in society and the need to alter social norms in order to conform to Enlightenment ideals of education and reason.
Something that I’m sure you’ve noticed about all of these examples is that thinking about the future was **serious business** by 18th century intellectual standards, and there is a lack of the more frivolous futurism seen in the science fiction genre that started with Jules Verne in the 19th century. I’d suggest this is the result of two things:
* Firstly the very direct application of contemporary intellectualism to governance. Obviously this constantly happens within many societies indirectly, but during this period everyone saw a very blatent connection between social philosophy and governmental policy that led to a number of large-scale changes and helped to ferment the French Revolution, as well as establish modern political discourse.
* Secondly, there is long history of utopianism within European literature and philosophy stretching back to ancient Greece that often evoked the future to criticize the present and advocate particular courses of action to ensure this utopian ideal. For a really good collection that contains a great cross-section of Utopian short stories from throughout history I strongly recommend Gregory Claeys [The Utopian Reader]( _URL_4_). Looking over some of the texts in there will really help you understand where these 18th century thinkers were coming from.
| [
"The reproduction of the 1830 Settlers Cabin was the fifth stop on the half-mile trail loop. Interpreters showed what life was like in this time period. One example is the spinning of wool that is sometimes demonstrated by an interpreter on the front porch of the cabin. Other work involved was churning butter, maki... |
Is this company, StemCell100, a scam? Is there any evidence that this product does what it says it does? What exactly makes it a scam or not? | After looking at their 'longevity research' page, I'm throwing my vote in for scam. They do a little *Drosophila* study (of which I am also highly dubious, but okay) but nowhere on that page do they **show** that their product has any effect on stem cells. They mention that *Astragalus membranaceus* inhibits mTOR and thus causes the animals to defy aging, but it's almost laughable to think that the solution to aging could possibly be so easy. *Plenty* of experiments have been done with mTOR and no spectacular results like this have been found.
I'm not entirely ready to discredit the molecular activities of compounds found in traditional herbal remedies, as it's entirely possible that they do truly have some kind of effect. But to claim that they mixed up some herbs and it makes your adult stem cells live much longer and healthier? Utter fantasy.
edit: Not a single reference on their 'stem cells' page. As a nascent *Drosophila* stem cell researcher, I am even more highly skeptical than before. | [
"The company came to be known for unproven claims that its products could be used to treat many diseases and conditions, including cancer, diabetes, autism and AIDS. There is no evidence that any of these claims were or are true.\n",
"The journal has been accused of being a \"broker of junk science\", too cozy wi... |
How does the water-vapour runaway greenhouse effect work? | So the C in your...
S = C*T^4
...takes the role of emissivity. It's fine for zeroth-order back-of-the-envelope calculations, but really doesn't work too well for getting good numerical answers when examining the greenhouse effect.
There are two problems here:
- The Stefan-Boltzmann Law is a gray calculation - you integrate all wavelengths together and come up with an average emission.
- It assumes a single layer that has only a single temperature that describes the entire atmosphere.
Unfortunately, radiative transfer isn't this simple. The absorption spectrum of water vapor is very complex, which means that you'll get very different emissivity depending at what wavelength you're probing.
For example, in the middle of a water vapor absorption line, the opacity is very high. That means the planetary cooling that's occurring in that wavelength will come from quite a high location in the atmosphere, since that's the only height at which photons can escape directly to space. Between emission lines, though, opacity is low, so those wavelengths will emit to space from a lower
height in the atmosphere.
That wouldn't be such a problem if the atmosphere were isothermal - i.e. the same temperature everywhere - but it's not. Up until you get to ~10 km high, the temperature is decreasing. This means wavelengths that are high opacity (and thus emitting from higher in the atmosphere) are also emitting less because of that T^4 term.
So not only is the C wavelength-dependent based on the water spectrum, but since that's also going to determine which height in the atmosphere is cooling to space, it also means the T is wavelength-dependent, too. Add to that the feedback cycle - increased water vapor not only changes the temperature throughout the atmosphere, but also changes opacity and thus the location of emission to space - you've suddenly got a very difficult non-linear problem.
When you end up doing a full calculation over all wavelengths and also include cloud feedback cycles, you find that the runaway greenhouse effect kicks in [somewhere around the global average surface temperature reaching 50 C (120 F)](_URL_0_)...though the exact value of this is still debated. With the global average still somewhere around 15 C (60 F), we're still a long way away from that.
**TL;DR**: Your functional form is really too simple to answer this question properly. | [
"A runaway greenhouse effect is when there is enough of a greenhouse gas in a planet's atmosphere such that the gas blocks thermal radiation from the planet, preventing the planet from cooling and from having liquid water on its surface. The runaway greenhouse effect can be defined by a limit on a planet's outgoing... |
How did Spain transition from fascist dictatorship to its current democratic, constitutional monarchy? Is it true that Franco bequeathed the country to King Juan-Carlos and it was he that instituted democracy? | Modern Spanish history is one of the most interesting topics I have found. Anyway, onto an answer:
Franco approved a law of succession in 1947, saying that Spain was kingdom and would remain a kingdom. Of course, Spain would have no king while Franco was alive as he was acting head of state. The law also said he could name his successor when he chose to.
Don Juan, the heir to the Spanish monarchy, and Franco decided in 1948 that Don Juan’s son - Juan Carlos - would return to Spain to be educated in Spanish schools and in Franco’s ideology. In essence, Franco groomed Juan Carlos to be his heir.
Juan Carlos completes this education and eventually married Sofia. And in 1969, Franco named him as his rightful successor to the dictatorship and Juan Carlos had to swear loyalty to Franco’s Movimiento Nacional. The two worked together after this, with Franco guiding Juan Carlos in his new role.
Franco dies in 1975 and Two days later, Juan Carlos becomes king of Spain. Now, Spain enters the period of the Restoration of the Monarchy. Juan Carlos started to issue reforms to the government and appointed Adolfo Suarez as president/prime minister (depends on your translation and understanding of Spanish government). Suarez would become instrumental in the transition to democracy and would become the first democratically elected prime minister of Spain’s new government.
In this time, many changes occur but one of the most interesting is el Pacto de olvido (the pact of forgetting), which was a political decision by both the left and right parties to essentially forget everything that happened during the Civil War and under Franco. This pact ensured that there would be no prosecutions for persons responsible for mass suffering. Important questions about the recent past were entirely ignored, so that Spain and its politicians could look towards the future and make the reforms needed.
In June of 1977, Spain held its first elections and in 1978, a new constitution was drafted that acknowledge Juan Carlos as king.
So, to answer your question: Franco did “bequeath” the country to Juan Carlos, but only after he had been groomed in his education and sworn allegiance to Franco and his ideologies. Juan Carlos did help ensure that Spain would become democratic but most of the “work” was completed by Suarez and other politicians of the time.
Some attribute these happenings as to why Spain has largely avoided the populist movements that we see in many countries today. Spanish people still struggle with The Pact of Forgetting and it’s implications to today, like should Franco’s remains be removed from El Valle de los Caídos (The Valley of the Fallen). | [
"The death of Francisco Franco in 1975 paved the way for Spain's transition from an autocratic, one-party dictatorship into a democratic, constitutional monarchy. As per the Succession Law of 1947, the Spanish monarchy was restored under the figure of Juan Carlos I, who quickly became the promoter of a peaceful dem... |
Will oil and water mix in a vacuum? | Their aversion to forming a miscible solution is due to differences in intermolecular forces and the entropy of the molecules at the interface, not gravity. | [
"Water and other liquids may accumulate on a product during the production process. \"Vacuum is often employed as a process for removing bulk and absorbed water (or other solvents) from a product. Combined\n",
"The most prevalent outgassing product in vacuum systems is water absorbed by chamber materials. It can ... |
Did 'No-go' areas that were controlled by the IRA in Northern Ireland show any fluctuations in crime levels? | Why were there free areas where the RUC and British Army wouldn't enter? | [
"By the mid-1970s, the conflict in Northern Ireland, known as the Troubles, showed no signs of abating. The Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) intensified its bombing campaign to drive British forces out, and began targeting English cities. The main loyalist paramilitary groups—the UVF and Ulster Defence Assoc... |
why is the war on drugs inherently flawed but a war on guns wouldn't be? | That's an awfully broad question. There are a variety of tactics and solutions that can take place under either umbrella term, which can be good or bad. Beyond that, the abuse patterns in either are certainly not the same. | [
"Many believe that the War on Drugs has been costly and ineffective largely because inadequate emphasis is placed on treatment of addiction. The United States leads the world in both recreational drug usage and incarceration rates. 70% of men arrested in metropolitan areas test positive for an illicit substance, an... |
how are non latin alphabet characters typed on a phone? | What kind of keyboard are you talking about? Just like QWERTY keyboard, there are keyboard for plenty of non-Latin alphabets, as shown here: _URL_0_
Every keyboard software supports installing various keyboard layouts.
East Asian languages also have special keyboard, [as explained in each of the answers here](_URL_1_). | [
"All non-Latin computer keyboard layouts can also input Latin letters as well as the script of the language, for example, when typing in URLs or names. This may be done through a special key on the keyboard devoted to this task, or through some special combination of keys, or through software programs that do not i... |
why is the fine art trade a medium for money laundering? | The value of fine art is pretty well pure perception. If i say this shitty painting is worth a million dollars and you're willing to cough up a million dollars for it, that's its value. This makes it a very easy way to disguise money laundering (which is just processing illicit income through legal transactions in order to provide a legal source to claim that income). You can also produce as much art as you like, and thus move quite a bit of money. Plus the fine art trade in general is a fairly secretive one with little oversight; you can have transactions where the buyer and seller are both listed a "private collection" or something similar. Neatly ties up any paper trail, especily if it was a cash transaction
It's also really easy to transport and smuggle art. If I have a box that says it's a shitty 50 dollar painting, but it's actually worth millions legitimately...how the fuck does customs know? They can't have someone show up and appraise every stupid painting so unless something else tips them off, across the border it goes with no one the wiser. And then maybe it disappears for 5-6 years, sitting in some rich person warehouse. Or it sits a freeport somewhere in singapore or something where it changes hands anonymously half a dozen times over a decade and good luck tracking any of that backwards when it finally sees the light of day again.
| [
"BULLET::::- Trade-based laundering: This method is one of the newest and most complex forms of money laundering. This involves under- or over-valuing invoices to disguise the movement of money. For example, the art market has been accused of being an ideal vehicle for money laundering due to several unique aspects... |
how the us stock market is not currently experiencing a bubble/overbought? | _URL_0_
The answer remains mostly the same - the economy, while a factor in the stock market, is not so large a factor that it defines how the stock market will perform. Plus things like unemployment and GDP growth are not the only pieces of the economic puzzle - there is a lot more to it than just statistics.
There are sectors in the US Stock Market that are not doing well - similarly, there are sectors in the US Stock Market that are doing very well. There are some sectors might be bubbles fueled more by demand/popularity rather than real value, and some that are generally just doing well.
The entire 'market' is not one giant bubble - rather than thinking of the stock market as a massive entity in and of itself, imagine it as a bunch of pools of water. Some pools might shrink in size, other pools might grow. Overall, there is growth, because there are always going to be pools that find a way to grow even if overall conditions are shit.
TL;DR: The US Economy is not so large a factor that its decline would necessarily be reflected in the stock market. There are many parts of the stock market, and there are almost always areas where people find a way to profit in bad times. The market will follow those leaders, and the stock market will find a way to keep growing. | [
"Predictions that the bubble would burst emerged during the dot-com bubble in the late 1990s. Predictions about a future burst increased following the October 27, 1997 mini-crash, in the wake of the Asian crisis. This caused an uncertain economic climate during the first few months of 1998. However conditions impro... |
how do people die from too much plastic surgery? | There's risks involved with any surgery, especially when anesthesia is involved. Things can go wrong - the person's heart stops, doctor makes a mistake, person gets an infection, etc. The odds of this for cosmetic surgery are low but if you keep going under the knife you're taking that chance each time and one day may get unlucky. | [
"Plastic surgery or reconstructive surgery is available in many cases to disfigured people. Some health insurance companies and government health care systems cover plastic surgery for these problems when they do not generally cover plastic surgery for what is labeled as \"cosmetic purposes\".\n",
"Since this pro... |
us drug adverts seem to mostly contain a voice over of the negative side effects so what is the point in having them? | Interest-only, in many countries, search advertisements are illegal. Most other developed Nations don't allow drug companies to directly Market their concoctions to Consumers. Part of it is because of the things you've noticed, which is that most consumers basically ignore the side effects at the end and instead pester their Physicians about whatever strange new drug we saw on television. This is likely a factor in the fact that so many Americans are on medications, with the various complications that come with that fact. Those warnings at the end are supposed to be there to protect the consumer, but that's not how they work. If McDonald's had a voice at the end of every commercial saying that their food contributes to obesity and heart disease, people would still ignore that morning had to go buy a Big Mac because they saw it on TV. That's how marketing works. | [
"In addition, it is possible that the ads had an unintended positive impact on perceptions towards drugs by portraying “benefits” associated with using, an association possibly strengthened by repeated exposure to messages and images suggesting the \"good-times\" people have while on drugs. Beliefs and behaviors of... |
There's a common condition colloquially known as "hypoglycemia," which doesn't actually meet the medical definition of hypoglycemia. What is it really? | There is in fact a name for this: [idiopathic postprandial syndrome](_URL_0_. The syndrome was first described in the 1980s to distinguish between patients with true hypoglycaemia and those suffering only the symptoms you describe. The word "idiopathic" means "of unknown cause", so I can't give you an answer as to what causes the symptoms.
As far as I'm aware, there isn't any real research going on into it; it's not exactly a serious pathology, and there's no obvious profit for companies in finding out what's going on and curing it. | [
"The most common cause of hypoglycemia is medications used to treat diabetes mellitus such as insulin, sulfonylureas, and biguanides. Risk is greater in diabetics who have eaten less than usual, exercised more than usual, or drunk alcohol. Other causes of hypoglycemia include kidney failure, certain tumors, liver d... |
energy changes and transforms, but doesn't disappear. | The saw and the log both heat up, so the chemically energy from your body is turned into thermal energy in the log and saw. Also, the sawing makes a sound, so some energy is lost to sound.
Edit:
I also want to talk about the “energy pool” idea. Certain energy transformations are basically non-recoverable. A good example (for the most part) is the heating of the saw and log. It’s very difficult to recover that energy in a usable form. There will always be some amount of energy that is no longer usable. This is embedded in the idea of entropy always increasing.
Entropy in this case (this is my preferred method of talking about entropy) is basically the ratio between total energy and usable energy. Since there’s always energy that is made unusable in a system, this ratio has a tendency to increase (usable energy goes down and total energy is constant, so that fraction gets larger). This is the 2nd law of thermodynamics. | [
"Energy transformation, also known as energy conversion, is the process of changing energy from one form to another. In physics, energy is a quantity that provides the capacity to perform work (e.g. lifting an object) or provides heat. In addition to being convertible, according to the law of conservation of energy... |
At the beginning of the 20th century, before refrigerators were commonplace houshold appliances, how did people conserve their food? Did they still use lots of salt and store it in the basement or was there some sort of interrim period where an alternative solution was found? | First, people simply bought fewer perishables. Instead of going shopping once a week and storing everything you bought until you needed it, you'd go to the butcher on the day you were actually planning to make roast beef or whatever. This is why milkmen used to be a thing: people got around the fact that they couldn't keep milk for long by simply having fresh milk delivered to their doorstep every morning. The whole production process moved a lot faster: cattle would be herded right into the middle of the city, slaughtered, butchered, and be in the shop the next day, ready for the cook to put on the table in the evening.
Although salted and dried meat was used, people didn't rely on it so much after tinned food became common in the 19th century. There are dozens of other things you can do to food to make it suitable for storage: pickle vegetables, turn fruit into jam, turn milk into cheese, etc, etc. Knowing the various methods of food preservation was a skills most housewives would have before it became easy to just buy stuff from a store in the 1950s and 1960s. Today we generally don't consider the fact that a lot of the foods we eat were originally just ways of keeping things edible for a long time.
Most houses had a pantry, a cupboard (or whole room) for storing food. Basements worked too, although in a city most people wouldn't be able to afford to give over a whole floor of their house to food storage. Any place that's dark and cool will stretch out the lifespan of food for a few days. However, people weren't entirely without artificial refrigeration. Iceboxes were very common, unless you were very poor. In rural areas peasants could harvest ice in the winter, store it in an insulated box, and have enough left by summer to store food. The wealthy built ice-houses, big underground bunkers, on their country estates which could store several tons. If you lived in a city then there was also a whole industry for ice-harvesting, which supplied massive amounts of ice and was big business as late as the 1930s.
Starvation wasn't even common in the 19th century in Europe, as the railways eliminated the primary cause: poor food transportation networks. There were one or two exceptions to this when particularly bad natural disasters hit (Ireland, looking at you), but certainly by the beginning of the 20th century famine was almost unheard of in most of Europe. However, that's only peacetime. During WW1 the Allies blockaded the Central Powers, and by 1917 Germany and Austria were experiencing severe food shortages. Several hundred thousand excess deaths during WW1 can be attributed to malnutrition.
Although people didn't generally starve to death, higher food prices than America meant malnutrition was more common in Europe. A survey done in Britain during the Boer war (about 1901) showed that a shocking proportion of urban industrial workers didn't meet the height and weight requirement to serve in the army because they had suffered childhood malnutrition. Even by WW2 most Europeans had far fewer calories in their daily diet than Americans, and were on average an inch or two shorter as a result. | [
"Early approaches to preserving food used variants of traditional cold boxes to solve the problem of how to take small quantities of products short distances to market. Thomas Moore, an engineer from Maryland, invented an early refrigerator which he patented in 1803; this involved a large, insulated wooden box, wit... |
what exactly gets lost when mass gets converted into energy? | Nothing gets 'lost' per se, that mass represents the energy (and some other stuff) that was originally bound up in the Hydrogen atoms. Helium atoms use less energy to keep everything together than two Hydrogen atoms, so some of that energy gets ejected from the newly minted helium atom. And that's how our sun shines. That little bit of mass that gets transferred into energy, times a very large number, per second.
Bonus: [Why does the Sun Shine](_URL_0_) | [
"Although mass cannot be converted to energy, in some reactions matter particles (which contain a form of rest energy) can be destroyed and the energy released can be converted to other types of energy that are more usable and obvious as forms of energy—such as light and energy of motion (heat, etc.). However, the ... |
When did the guitar as we know it come about? | This is an excellent question, and kind of depends on how you define "guitar."
If you're just looking for the earliest time you could go back in time and look at an instrument and think "Hey, that looks like a guitar," the earliest documented example is about 1200 BC, coming from a [Hittieite Rock Carving](_URL_1_), so we're getting biblical up in here.
However, if you want similar to "as we know it," your best bet is probably Medieval Spain. They were definitely in use there by the 1200s, and by the Baroque period of classical music (1500s-1600s...Think Pachelbel's Canon, Handel's Messiah and Vivaldi's Four seasons for stylistic reference) they were occasionally used in compositions in Western Europe.
When we get into the modern guitar with 6 string tuning et. al, the earliest example is again Spain, with an instrument called the [Vihulea](_URL_0_), that eventually came to be known as the guitar. (I apologize for linking to Wikipedia, but I'm on my phone and that's the best I can do right now).
However, Modern guitar tuning (EADGBE) came from an instrument called the Lute, which was in use from the Ancient Greeks through the Renaissance and on.
So in summary, if you want something that looked enough like a guitar that Bill and Ted could meet up with a player of the instrument and say "You play too? Excellent, Dude!," we're looking at Biblical Times. Similar instruments, including the lute continued to be played and written for well into the middle ages.
If you want something tuned like a guitar, we're most likely looking at the lute, which was used by the Ancient Greeks, and they had developed a long-necked (so guitar-esque looking) by 300 BC.
The 6 stringed version (which is what is commonly used today and I would consider to be the earliest "as we know it") came from Spain in the 14 or 1500s.
**EDIT** Meant BC, not BS. | [
"The guitar is an ancient instrument, whose history can be traced back over 4000 years. Many theories have been advanced about the instrument's ancestry, but the modern acoustic guitar comes from a long progression of stringed musical instruments. It has often been claimed that the guitar is a development of the me... |
In the year 1750, how different was the standard of living in Eastern Europe (ex. Ukraine, Belarus, Russia) and Western Europe (France, England, Spain)? | This question has to be narrowed down or the answer can only be yes and no.
I'm going to assume that you mean the rural population which would be the most representative demographic for the country in general.
It could be argued that in 1750, Britain and The Netherlands would have higher living standards that the rest of Europe, the tradtional view of Northwestern Europe as the modernizing and driving part of the world.
On the other hand was Scandinavia, aka the rest of Northwestern Europe, dirt poor. The rural population of Sweden, especially the eastern parts, where ravaged by reoccuring famines and epidemics, a cycle which continued up until the latter half of the 19th century.
I have to admit that I'm not very well versed in the living conditions of eastern europe, but I can't imagine that it could be significantly worse than rural Scandinavia, apart from the institution of serfdom and how that impacted on the life of the ordinary farmer. I'm sure someone with better knowledge can correct me.
tl;dr: It was not fun being a farmer in Scandinavia in 1750.
| [
"For the 18th century, and in comparison to non-European regions, Bairoch in 1995 stated that, in the mid-18th century, \"the average standard of living in Europe was a little bit lower than that of the rest of the world.\"\n",
"Until the eighteenth century, living standards were at least equal to most of Europe.... |
Why doesn't cream separate into fat and water? | You have observed curdling, which actually is separation, or the process of "flocculation"; it just happens at a slower rate in cream than, say, a mixture of oil and water. Rate of flocculation is driven by several variables, but all boil (or flocculate?) down to the kinetics of the fat molecules, i.e. droplet radius, droplet density, and viscosity of the liquid it is homogenized in.
| [
"Cream is a dairy product composed of the higher-butterfat layer skimmed from the top of milk before homogenization. In un-homogenized milk, the fat, which is less dense, eventually rises to the top. In the industrial production of cream, this process is accelerated by using centrifuges called \"separators\". In ma... |
What kind of deity or king/ruler is this statue? | By the craftsmanship, chair, and general style this is definitely Chinese (or Chinese-esque), though nothing stick out at me to identify them. He could be Buddhist god or trickster given the expression, maybe a famous or deified member of Chinese history, although I do not recognise this one in particular, I'm only familiar with the most famous. It could be some sculpted for ancestor reverence, though I doubt it.
Source, Lived in China for several years studying TCM which includes the study of Chinese arts and history. | [
"The statue suitably depicted a figure resembling Hades or Pluto, both being kings of the Greek underworld, and was shown enthroned with the modius, a basket/grain-measure, on his head, since it was a Greek symbol for the land of the dead. He also held a sceptre in his hand indicating his rulership, with Cerberus, ... |
why do schools in the u.s punish their students so harshly? | 3 major reasons.
1) Everyone became somewhat insane because of school shootings here, so they can put the color of sense on stupid approaches to school violence. So having an overkill policy about "weapons" is not treated as being as dumb as it ought to be.
2) Schools can be sued by parents, and often are, for stupid reasons. This is because of the culture of lawsuits and liability is pretty rough in the US, which is *partly* because we don't have universal healthcare and our healthcare is absurdly expensive. So if someone gets hurt, the parents go bankrupt and then in turn give the school an absurd bill.
In order to avoid being held libable for literally anything, schools write rules in such a way that they keep their responsibility for anything remotely bad happening to an absolute minimum. They're trying to avoid being held accountable for things because being held accountable can mean millions in damages for something like a broken bone.
So they turn around and exact the maximum penalty for stuff, so that if it comes down to it in court, they can say they did the most they could have done.
3) Similarly, parents complaining to school boards or politicians about a given school employee gives a very high likelihood of that person getting fired. As such, they'll do anything it takes to avoid being called out by some angry parent to their superiors. So these "zero tolerance" policies don't just help the school avoid accountability, it likewise helps teachers, principals, and even superintendents from taking any responsibility for a bad situation.
If we had universal healthcare, and were willing to tell idiots to shut up and go home, instead of responding to their entitled, asshole demands to fire people, none of this would be necessary.
There is also the cultural belief among those very same entitled idiots that poor performance on a pupil's part is entirely the school's fault. Since many of our students are indeed poor performing morons (you know, being raised by morons themselves, this makes sense,) schools in general are viewed by these people as incompetent. So it breeds the idea that teachers/administrators actually shouldn't be allowed to exercise judgment at all.
| [
"Another criticism is that the zero-tolerance policies have actually caused schools to turn a blind eye to bullying, resulting in them refusing to solve individual cases in an attempt to make their image look better. The zero-tolerance policy also punishes both the attacker and the defender in a fight, even when th... |
Why are solar panels flat and not concave? | I think you are confusing [solar panels](_URL_0_) with [solar furnaces](_URL_1_).
A solar furnace typically *does* have parabolic mirrors like you described which reflect sunlight to some concentrated point with the hopes of using the heat energy (by say, boiling water) to generate energy.
Solar panels are much different - they contain [photovoltaic cells](_URL_2_) which *absorb* the sunlight and convert it directly to electricity by the photovoltaic effect. | [
"Because solar cars are often purpose-built, and because arrays do not usually move in relation to the rest of the vehicle (with notable exceptions), this race-route-driven, flat-panel versus convex design compromise is one of the most significant decisions that a solar car designer must make.\n",
"The roof of Ci... |
Why don't deBrogile wavelengths get infinitely large as an object's speed approaches zero? | It does get arbitrarily large; Heisenberg's uncertainty principle implies that if you measure p close to 0 then the wave function will have to be spread out in space. | [
"If the obstruction dimensions are much smaller than the wavelength of the incident plane wave, the wave is essentially unaffected. For example, low frequency (LF) broadcasts, also known as long waves, at about 200 kHz has a wavelength of 1500 m and is not significantly affected by most average size buildings, whic... |
How much gasoline do various activities in one's car use up? | (assuming you're American): 1 hp = 745 watts. Figure your alternator is at worst 85% efficient at converting energy from the serpentine belt into electricity. So, the alternator would need (500 electric watts) * (1 belt watt / 0.85 electric watts) = 588.23 belt watts.
1 watt = 1 J/sec. [One litre of gasoline has about 34 MJ of energy](_URL_0_)
Say your engine is about 18% efficient at getting the energy out of the gasoline and into your alternator. So, you need to burn 588 J/s / 0.18 = 3266.66, call it 3267 J gasoline per second.
(3267 J / s) / (3.4E7 J / l) = 9.6E-5 l/s, or about 2.53E-5 US gallons per second. In one hour, you would burn an additional 0.091 gallons.
How this affects your fuel economy depends on your rate of travel while you are generating the extra electricity, but as you can see it's pretty negligible compared to the several kilowatts your engine has to generate just to push air out of the way at highway speeds. | [
"As the average vehicle of the time consumed between two and three liters (about 0.5–0.8 gallons) of gasoline (petrol) an hour while idling, it was estimated that Americans wasted up to of oil per day idling their engines in the lines at gas stations.\n",
"One measure of alternative fuels in the U.S. is the \"gas... |
how do electrical instruments work? | No. Electrical musical instruments work by having magnetic pickups which output a signal based on the frequency of the vibrating metal string. This output current is then amplified and converted into sound by the amplifier. | [
"An electronic musical instrument is a musical instrument that produces sound using electronic circuitry. Such an instrument sounds by outputting an electrical, electronic or digital audio signal that ultimately is plugged into a power amplifier which drives a loudspeaker, creating the sound heard by the performer ... |
Monday Methods| Reading Historical Fiction | I'm only an amateur historian, but I've always used historical fiction as a gateway to learning about the real stuff, and I've channeled that into teaching history to my teenage son (daughter & I do different things, because she has different interests).
He's not much of a book reader, so I use TV (movies and video games, as well) as my way in. We usually watch at least one episode an evening together, and we discuss it as we go along - so much so that a 45 minute program can sometimes take us 2 hours or more to finish. And when I don't know something, we look it up.
It's led to regularly spectacular conversations over the years, and the older he gets, the better it gets, because he's got a little more information/experience to work with each time - more frames of reference to work with.
It's broadened his horizons regarding what kind of things he finds interesting the older he's gotten, too, so I've been able to branch out in terms of subject matter *and* delivery and find him still actively engaged.
For example, he thoroughly enjoyed *The Tudors*, and found James Frain's Cromwell very interesting, so I will eventually show him *Wolf Hall,* which shows us a different kind of Cromwell (same for Natalie Dormer's Anne Boleyn vs. Claire Foy's and Jonathan Rhys Meyers' Henry vs Damian Lewis', etc, etc, etc.) It would be too dry for him if he hadn't already watched the far flashier *Tudors* and heard all the good gossip there.
I usually watch whatever I show him by myself first - for my purposes, historical accuracy is *great,* but it's not actually the most important thing, because I can correct that as we go along. Instead, what I want is to just find a good story told well, one that will capture his interest, because that's always going to be the best time to engage him.
Watching them first also allows me to avoid spoilers - if he asks a question about something that would give away a good twist in the show, I tell him we need to table that until later.
Edit: I accidentally a word | [
"A 20th-century variant of the historical novel is documentary fiction, which incorporates \"not only historical characters and events, but also reports of everyday events\" found in contemporary newspapers. Examples of this variant form of historical novel include \"U.S.A.\" (1938), and \"Ragtime\" (1975) by E.L. ... |
What is the probability of 2 snowflakes being the same | Depends on what you define as "the same" snowflake (the same or merely looks the same). And how large your minimum snowflake needs to be before you consider it. The smallest ice crystals can easily be alike. For large complex snowflakes there are more possible shape configurations than atoms in the universe.
Basically, there is no fixed formula, but if you consider complex snowflakes (the beautiful ones) the probability of two identical snowflakes is essentially zero. So close to zero, that it is unlikely that any two complex snow crystals that have ever existed on earth have looked completely alike.
_URL_0_ | [
"BULLET::::- October 12: Somewhat unusually cool air allows 0.51 cm of snow to fall, just enough to break the old record of the earliest snowfall of the season. The previous record was October 13. The requirements for measurement is 0.25 cm or higher. Below that, it would have been measured as a \"trace\" amount of... |
Do other planets have weather? | Oh yes.
- **Venus**: There's hardly any axial tilt, so not much in the way of seasons. The atmosphere is so thick near the surface that it has a huge thermal inertia, so not much in the way of warm/cold fronts. Similarly, because the atmosphere near the surface is so sluggish, winds there never get above a couple meters per second (a few miles per hour), though they do reach higher velocities higher up in the atmosphere. There is rain from the sulfuric acid clouds...although it all evaporates before it hits the ground, so it's more correct to call it virga.
- **Mars**: With a very thin atmosphere and thus very little thermal inertia, there are huge difference in temperature across the surface, ranging anywhere from +20 °C (68 °F) at noon on the equator to -150 °C (-240 °F) at the poles in the middle of winter. Note, however, even those warm +20 °C temps are taken right above the surface; just a meter or two above that, and temperatures can drop by 40 °C, so you could wear shorts but would need a parka. Winds can be up to about 30 meters per second (60 mph), and we've [taken images of dust devils](_URL_0_) on the surface. We've also [seen cyclones](_URL_6_) on Mars, and [imaged ice clouds](_URL_7_) moving across the sky.
- **Jupiter**: Probably more weather than anywhere else, including Earth. Although the cloud-tops are a frigid -150 °C (-240 °F), that quickly increases as you go deeper. There are three main cloud decks on Jupiter: ammonia ice, ammonium hydrosulfide beneath that, and liquid water clouds beneath that. There's constant circulation of these clouds between the white zones and brown belts, as shown in [this diagram](_URL_8_). There are countless oval vortices (including the Great Red Spot, which isn't a storm but rather a region of calm winds) as well as banded jet streams [all swirling past each other](_URL_1_), in a careful interplay of exchanging energy as winds can get up to 180 m/s (400 mph). The water clouds have the most energy, with towering thunderheads 10 times the size they are on Earth, and rain that falls more than twice as fast as on Earth. We've also captured lots of [images of lightning](_URL_5_) on Jupiter, much more powerful than anything produced on Earth.
- **Saturn**: Very similar to Jupiter, but a lot more obscured by the thick orange haze layer. While there's no massive oval vortex like the Great Red Spot, roughly once a Saturn-year [we see a massive storm outbreak](_URL_2_) of white clouds that encircle the planet. Exactly why this happens we don't know, but the hypothesis is that it's some kind of huge convection event that takes 29 Earth-years to build up.
- **Titan**: Although not technically a planet, the largest moon of Saturn has an atmosphere 50% thicker than Earth's, and weather systems that are surprisingly Earth-like...provided that you replace the role of water in our atmosphere with the role of methane and ethane in Titan's atmosphere at around -180 °C (-290 °F). Although here too it's tough to peer through the haze, we've [observed methane/ethane clouds](_URL_3_) building and raining down on the surface, filling rivers that feed into lakes of liquid methane/ethane.
- **Uranus**: When Voyager 2 first flew past in 1986, it was really odd that we observed essentially no weather at all here, just a featureless disc colored blue by methane haze. However, Uranus is essentially rotating on its side, and during that flyby the North Pole was pointed straight at the Sun. As we approached Uranian equinox in 2007, we pointed Hubble back at that planet and [saw an outbreak of methane storms](_URL_4_) in the formerly winter hemisphere. Somehow this planet transitions between quiet and active phases for weather, likely a seasonal effect caused by its enormous axial tilt.
- **Neptune**: With the fastest winds in the Solar System whipping around at 600 m/s (1,300 mph), Neptune [shows a wide variety](_URL_9_) of methane storms as well as dark vortices. Neptune generates almost 3 times as much heat as it receives from the Sun (which admittedly, isn't much when you're that far out in the Solar System). We think this internal heat is what drives the energy of all these storms...but as of yet, it remains a huge unsolved mystery in planetary science what the source of this internal heat actually is. | [
"Planetary atmospheres are affected by the varying degrees of energy received from either the Sun or their interiors, leading to the formation of dynamic weather systems such as hurricanes, (on Earth), planet-wide dust storms (on Mars), an Earth-sized anticyclone on Jupiter (called the Great Red Spot), and holes in... |
Do we know that pre-historic Megalodon wasn't a hammerhead type shark? | It's full name is *Carcharodon megalodon*, so it's in the same genus as the great white shark (*Carcharodon carcharias*). Their teeth are so similar that most scientists agree that this is the correct classification, and as far as I'm aware, there's no evidence to suggest that they belonged to Sphyrnidae (the family that hammerheads belong to). | [
"The great hammerhead (\"Sphyrna mokarran\") is the largest species of hammerhead shark, belonging to the family Sphyrnidae, attaining a maximum length of . It is found in tropical and warm temperate waters worldwide, inhabiting coastal areas and the continental shelf. The great hammerhead can be distinguished from... |
Why/how did some diseases receive names which sound like peoples' (last) names? (i.e., Crohn's, Parkinson's) | Chrons was names after Dr. Burril Chron who described it in the 30s, Parkinson's was again after the person to describe it Dr. James Parkinson in the 1800s, ALS is Lou Gehrig's because of baseball player Lou Gehrig who was a very well known person who had it.
All these are Googleable btw | [
"There is no set common convention for the naming of newly identified syndromes. In the past, syndromes were often named after the physician or scientist who identified and described the condition in an initial publication, these are referred to as \"eponymous syndromes\". In some cases, diseases are named after th... |
am i legally allowed to build a spaceship and launch into space? | If you live in the US, then you would have to get a license from the FAA (since you don't want it to hit any flying aircraft/satellite and not appear as though you are building a surface-to-air missile).
Edit: [Link](_URL_0_) | [
"On April 1, 2004, the U.S. Department of Transportation issued the company what it called the world's first license for a sub-orbital crewed rocket flight. The license was approved by the Federal Aviation Administration's Office of Commercial Space Transportation, which has backed licenses for more than 150 commer... |
what difference will it make if i use soap instead of shampoo for my hair? what if i just use conditioner everyday instead of shampoo, will it be better for my hair? | Short answer: maybe nothing, or maybe your skin gets a little drier with soap. Nothing but conditioner will leave your scalp a little more oily but you'd adapt to that eventually.
Longer answer: Shampoo is (typically, if somebody chimes in saying BUT WHAT ABOUT THHHIISSS BRAND, please go away) basically a *detergent*. The stuff that cleans your clothes and hair are usually (almost exactly) the same thing.
A *detergent* is a synthetic *surfactant*. A surfactant is broadly something that makes water, well, wetter. It lets the water get into areas it couldn't reach because of tension, and makes water more *soluble*, which lets more things dissolve in it and get carried away.
Why does being synthetic matter? It doesn't necessarily matter, but it may mean the maker of the product has done a few things to make it a little more gentle than the soap maker has. Of course, for specific brands the exact opposite may be true. Some soaps are pretty darn gentle while some shampoos can be really rough. But, shampoos also often have thickening agents in them that let the makers dissolve less of the detergent in the mix. That makes it easier to get the cleaning product *just right* while also being able to spread all over your scalp.
Soaps tend to be a bit more concentrated in that regard, because there is very little call for them not to be.
Some folks do enjoy mixing their own shampoos by starting with Castile Soap, which comes in a big bottle that you can then mix to your hearts content. It is more 'natural' in the sense that the ingredients are more direct and less chemically derived in tanks from weird sources. Whether that is good or not is totally up to you.
Footnote: Conditioner contains a small amount of soap/detergent along with other things. Some people use it exclusively for their hair cleaning. | [
"One reason is concern about the effect of ingredients typically found in commercial hair care products. Shampoo typically contains chemical additives such as sodium lauryl sulfate and sodium laureth sulfate, which can irritate sensitive skin or if not thoroughly rinsed. Such chemical additives are also believed by... |
Why are p-values reported as "significant" or not, vs. just giving the value? | > p-value [is the] the likelihood that the reported difference is real in the population, rather than the artifact of an imperfect sample
That's what people want *p*, or rather 1-*p*, to be. But it isn't.
In hypothesis testing *p* is the probability that the test statistic (whatever that's chosen to be) would take a value at least as extreme as the one observed *if the null hypothesis were true*. If we then see a very low *p* along with a strong signal from the test statistic then we feel justified in rejecting the null hypothesis (the hypothesis that the effect being studied did not occur). The threshold chosen for *p* in any particular study is like a challenge the investigators set themselves to come up with a really good experiment. If the results are significant at *p*≤0.05 that's quite good, if they are significant at *p*≤0.01, that's much better.
And, as /u/airbornemint says, until quite recently this was done with standard tables, which provided pre-cooked statistics for certain preferred *p*-values (0.05, 0.01, etc) so everybody tended to use those, and they kind of got baked in to the assumptions about what made a good result.
> I wonder if we're maybe setting people who report science, or don't understand stats well, for failure?
They aren't being set up, exactly, but *p* is hard to think about correctly and many working scientists are maybe a bit confused about it. It is is all very indirect and confusing, largely because Fisher invented the basics of hypothesis testing in order to try and make sense of large bodies of unsystematic data that never were about testing a stated hypothesis in the first place.
| [
"The \"p\"-value is the probability of observing a test statistic \"at least\" as extreme in a chi-square distribution. Accordingly, since the cumulative distribution function (CDF) for the appropriate degrees of freedom \"(df)\" gives the probability of having obtained a value \"less extreme\" than this point, sub... |
why is crawling on hands and knees so tiring for an adult but babies have no problem? | It is difficult for a baby to crawl around. It especially takes very strong core muscles, as well as arm and wrist strength. Babies crawl because they haven't yet learned the more efficient and easier mode of walking.
It's actually a problem when babies transition from crawling to walking too quickly, because many of their muscles won't get developed as well. Walking upright doesn't really exercise your arms or hands, so children that begin walking quickly can end up with worse fine motor control.
For adults, why is crawling particularly hard? It's partly lack of experience. We don't put a ton of weight on our arms, so we're not used to using them in that way. It's also partly that we're so much bigger. This puts a lot of weight on our knees/shins which can be very uncomfortable. | [
"Though crawling is an important developmental milestone in children, it is not necessary for healthy development. Some babies skip crawling and go directly to walking. Others \"bottom shuffle\" instead of crawling (sometimes referred to as \"bum-shuffling\", or \"scooting\"). Bottom-shuffling babies sit on their b... |
When doing something strenuous, such as lifting weights, why does it feel necessary to tightly close your eyes? | I believe what you are talking about is called the valsalva maneuver. Which is defined as trying to exhale with a closed glottis (breathing out without letting air out). This along with the contraction of your thoracic and abdominal muscles makes your core more solid. A solid core better transfers force across your body, such as from your legs to your arms when you are lifting a couch. The involvement of the eyes is further muscle contraction which is unrelated to making your core stronger but goes along the same line as muscle contraction in your core.
Also studies have shown that thinking about muscles contracting can make you stronger, so closed eyes may make you focus more on the lift, and potentially make the lift more successful. | [
"When concentrating on a visually intense task, such as continuously focusing on a book or computer monitor, the ciliary muscle tightens. This can cause the eyes to get irritated and uncomfortable. Giving the eyes a chance to focus on a distant object at least once an hour usually alleviates the problem.\n",
"One... |
What physical properties does a pH meter use to measure pH? | At the tip of the probe there is a thin glass bulb. Inside the bulb are two electrodes that measure voltage. One electrode is contained in a liquid with a fixed pH. The other electrode responds to the pH of the water sample. The difference in voltage between the two probes is used to determine the pH. [Source](_URL_0_) | [
"A pH meter is a scientific instrument that measures the hydrogen-ion activity in water-based solutions, indicating its acidity or alkalinity expressed as pH. The pH meter measures the difference in electrical potential between a pH electrode and a reference electrode, and so the pH meter is sometimes referred to a... |
what's the explanation for physically recoiling when we see something really odd or disturbing? | It's an instinct designed to increase the distance between you and anything that might be threatening, very quickly, before you even take the time to think about it. | [
"He discovered the cause of the \"haunting\" by accident. The next day Tandy, a keen fencer, was polishing his sword when he noticed that the blade was vibrating even when clamped in a vice. From this Tandy developed the idea that infrasound might be present in the laboratory. Further experimentation showed that th... |
Does flying an airplane against the rotation of the planet result in a shorter duration of flight vs a flight with the rotation if the planet? | The plane flies at a certain speed relative to the air, and the air rotates with the Earth, so no. | [
"Unlike the Earth and Mars, Venus’s structure does not seem to allow the same slow polar wander; when observed the maximum moment of inertia of Venus is largely offset from the geographic pole. Therefore, the deviation of the maximum moment of inertia will remain for longer periods of time. One proposed solution to... |
In English, when did "ask" replace "ax" and why has "ax" remained in usage by some groups (like some African-Americans)? | As your own question shows, “ask” did not replace “aks,” since “aks” is still in common use. You find it not only in African-American English, but numerous British dialects use it as well.
The better way to think about it is that these are two variants that have always been present. Some people prefer one while others prefer another way. It is true that currently “standardized” versions of both British and American English prefer the “ask” version, and this suggests to many that “aks” is somehow wrong, but this is no more true than the opposite side that you sometimes hear when people say “aks” is older and therefore more correct.
As for why we have both variants? They are simply metathesized versions, like “pretty” and “purty,” or “three” and “third.” The sk/ks metathesis isn’t common in Modern English, but it’s very common in Old English. For example, it’s common to see both “fisc” and “fix” (fish) and “tusc” and “tux” (tusk).
| [
"Despite being written in upper case, \"AXA\" is not an acronym, but was chosen because its name can be pronounced easily by people who speak any language. After acquiring the Drouot Group in 1982, Chairman and CEO Claude Bébéar hired an outside consultant to conduct a computer-aided search for a new name. Bébéar w... |
if the calender is based on astronomy, how did they do it in the dark ages? | I've not heard that astronomy was ever heresy. But in any case Europe didn't change calendars during the Dark Ages. The [Julian calendar](_URL_0_) adopted by Julius Caesar was in use until the late 16th century (later in some countries) when it was replaced by the Gregorian one which we use today.
The (later) Julian Calendar had leap years _every_ four years, which the Gregorian corrected by having leap years every four years, except for every 100 years, except for every 400 years. (2012 is a leap year, 1900 was not a leap year, 2000 was a leap year)
But it's not a lunar calendar or some such which requires observation of celestial events. It only requires that you follow the rules and count days. Part of the reason for the Gregorian reform was that the calendar had become increasingly out of sync with the seasons (as defined by when the church was founded), and they wanted Easter to be at the right place.
| [
"This Darkover chronology uses the time period designations first provided by the author as \"\"A Readers Guide to Darkover\"\" in \"The Heirs of Hammerfell\" (1989). Some of these time periods overlap, particularly the Ages of Chaos and the Hundred Kingdoms eras. It's occasionally the case that the official reader... |
How were jewels cut and polished prior to the modern era? | I do a bit of lapidary work, [I posed a similar question to other lapidaries on the Gemology Online Forum a while back.](_URL_0_) They posted some good source material.
Modern lapidaries can do all their work with synthetic diamond grit. It is precisely graded, so your prepolish will not contain a single coarse particle in a million. Diamond chews through almost any gemstone with nearly equal speed. A pre modern lapidary would have to work hard to procure grit. Ganet (emory) is easy to find (in opaque forms) and usable to grind quartz, but harder gems require some powdered gem as a grit. With motorised equipment, it takes twelve hour to cut a diamond with diamond grit, but only a couple hours to cut a sapphire, wich is the next hardest gem. I imagine grinding sapphire with sapphire or topaz with topaz would be similarly slow.
They must have had a process to turn identifiable chunks of mineral into grit so fine that it leaves scratches smaller than the wavelength of light. I suspect they started with coarse grit, and let the stone pulverise the grit until it was a fine polish. The technique for grading grit is to drop it into viscous liquid; coarse grit settles out first, then medium, then fine...
factoids:
All of the grinding is done wet, diamonds are hydrophobic so diamond cutting is done with oil as lubricant.
Romans and Chinese didn't know how to cut diamonds, but valued small, sharp crytals as engravers for cameos or jade carvings.
The ancient Greeks and Romans knew diamonds had clevage planes, but they thought the only blade hard enought to split one along that plane was a iron sword that was quenched in goat blood after forging.
Through most of history, gems were thought to have supernatural power. The lapidary would have been a dusty craftsman, but also an intermediarry with a mystical world.
Gems are the oldest global trade, gem dealers would have seen lands more exotic than anyone else, including kings. The gem trade operates, among people who know each other's reputations, on trust. Even today, million dollar parcels of gems are traded on a handshake, by people from different nations and cultures. But fake gems are the oldest and most lucrative con in the book. They are a fake status object to us, like imitation Nikes. To people of the past, they were faulty talismans, you would pay for a crystalized essence of strength or health, and get glass. | [
"Cutting of diamonds and other gemstones was invented in the mid 14th century. This allowed for lighter settings that covered less of the stone. The arrival of the first imported cut diamonds therefore were of great interest to the merchants in Ukraine.\n",
"The history of diamond cuts can be traced to the late M... |
What is the smallest radius planet that we could realistically walk on in earth like gravity? | This depends. If you assume a planet can be made out of any thing, take enough of the heaviest known element to have the same mass as the Earth, then determine its radius from its density.
If you are talking about planets like the Earth, with the same mass and density profile, the answer is the radius of the Earth | [
"Within the Solar System, the planet with the largest Hill radius is Neptune, with 116 million km, or 0.775 au; its great distance from the Sun amply compensates for its small mass relative to Jupiter (whose own Hill radius measures 53 million km). An asteroid from the asteroid belt will have a Hill sphere that can... |
why after running for a while do my lungs get that painful burning sensation? | I'm surprised no one's given this answer yet, so here goes:
Congratulations! You're using a lot more of your lungs than you used to. While you're running, you're building up an oxygen debt as your muscles start to use more and more oxygen than you've asked them to in the past, and your lungs are struggling to keep up. As a result, you start really expanding your chest muscles -- does this sound familiar? This can be where side stitches come from.
However, your lungs are really only used to taking in so much oxygen. Chances are when you're just sitting around during the day, or walking places, you only take very shallow breaths. The alveoli at the bottom of your lungs don't see much action and they get lazy, but when you start taking deep, heaving breaths you start to use them -- and they don't like that very much.
This can happen regardless of whether it's cold or warm outside, and regardless of whether you're breathing in through your mouth and out through your nose or what have you (and for the record, I'm pretty sure you can breath through whichever orifices you choose [er, within reason] and breath out through whichever orifices you choose [again, choose wisely] as long as you're getting enough breath. Some people recommend breathing through both your nose and your mouth!)
In either case, it really just means that you're helping your lungs gain capacity. I would suggest looking up some breathing exercises online, being really conscious of how deeply you breathe during your day, and most importantly, keep running. :)
Ninja edited for punctuation and stuff.
Real edit: Someone made a fair criticism that this did not give a very scientific/complete answer. This article from a fitness website seems to provide a reasonable scientific explanation of what's going on, but I can't find any actual primary scientific studies yet...
_URL_0_ | [
"Many people experience a burning sensation in their chest occasionally, caused by stomach acids refluxing into the esophagus, normally called heartburn. Extended exposure to heartburn may erode the lining of the esophagus, leading potentially to Barrett's esophagus which is associated with an increased risk of ade... |
on some websites it says that venus is hotter than mercury because it has an atmosphere, however where does that heat energy transfer to if space is a vacuum? | Planets can also emit excess heat through *radiation,* typically by emitting infrared light. | [
"The large amount of CO in the atmosphere together with water vapour and sulfur dioxide create a strong greenhouse effect, trapping solar energy and raising the surface temperature to around 740 K (467 °C), hotter than any other planet in the Solar System, even that of Mercury despite being located farther out from... |
Eating can raise dopamine, but how exactly? | Dopamine levels are kind of neither here nor there.
Pleasurable activities activate the pleasure circuits in your brain, the ventral tegmental area (VTA). Activating the VTA is what makes things feel pleasurable and in turn makes you want to do them again. Sex, cuddling, talking, eating and all sorts of activities activate the VTA. And so you learn to do them again.
Now it just so happens that that the VTA uses Dopamine as its signalling neurotransmitter. So activating the VTA causes Dopamine release within the VTA. It is in this somewhat limited sense that Dopamine rises when eating. But it is something of a coincidence/happemstance the VTA uses Dopamine rather than some other neurotransmitter.
| [
"An increase in dopamine in the caudate and putamen have been found in binge eaters, and studies have found a decrease in a particular serotonin transporter (5-HT) in binge eaters compared to controls. Both the caudate nucleus and putamen make up the dorsal striatum and are important as part of the brain's memory s... |
how and why did the levees in new orleans break during katrina? what should have been done before hand, if anything? | Most of the levees in NOLA failed because the height of the flood water exceeded the height of the levee. There are basically two types of levees in that area, the first type is used in most suburban areas and looks like a big, grass covered hill extending down the length of the waterfront (either the Mississippi River or Lake Ponchartrain). The second type is used in more congested urban locations and basically looks like a big cement wall. When the water level gets higher than the levee, water starts to spill over the top and down to the ground on the dry side (called overtopping). If the water level stays high enough to cause overtopping for a while, eventually the water will either erode the structure of the levee itself (as with the hill type levees) or the churning action of the water as it hits the ground will erode the ground underneath the levee, causing a collapse (as with the wall type levees). I think all of the levee breaches during Katrina were caused by overtopping, but there is one other way a levee can fail during a storm. Basically the hill type levees get kind of soggy after they've been holding back water for a while. A really soggy levee isn't necessarily doomed, but it is more vulnerable to being breached if it gets hit by something big, such as a stray barge.
I haven't read the report you referred to, but I'm assuming the poor grade for levees mostly has to do with their height. Sea level has risen quite a bit in the last 50 years (this is an undisputed fact regardless of political opinions as to the cause) and show no signs of stopping. The federal height standards for most of the levees in the country just doesn't cut the mustard at the current rate of sea level rise. Also, very powerful storms of all kinds are becoming more frequent (this is also true regardless of anyone's personal beliefs about why it's happening). Therefore, a levee is more likely to encounter a flood it wasn't designed to handle now than it was to encounter such a flood 30 or 40 years ago. Also, I believe that not all levees are required to follow federal height guidelines so there are a lot of state, county (or parish), and city built levees that are even shorter than the federal ones. So, yeah. All the levees need to be taller than they are now if we want to stay dry in the coming years.
As for whether or not that played a role in what happened during and after Katrina, yes and no. Yes, the levees failed because they were too short. No because long before Katrina happened, people (including FEMA) knew that a storm like Katrina could hit New Orleans and they knew it would be an epic disaster if it did. I think the reason it happened anyway has a lot to do with human nature (and I say this as someone born and raised in NOLA). First, improving the levees in New Orleans cost billions of federal taxpayer dollars. Before Katrina happened, many Americans wouldn't have wanted to pay that much for levee improvements in a city they didn't live in. Also, people who don't live in areas that are affected by hurricanes often truly have no understanding of how powerful and dangerous these storms can be. Seriously, you have no idea the kinds of stupid s**t people say and do when encountering their first hurricane. Such people often tend to underestimate the need for protective infrastructure in hurricane prone areas. Finally, I think we the locals were also somewhat complicit in our lack of preparation. New Orleans hadn't been directly hit by a hurricane since the '60s and even then, the flooding was contained to one section of town. I think most locals figured that we'd continue dodging the bullet, and even if we didn't, I'm fairly certain that most of us never imagined the damage would be so widespread. To give some perspective, Katrina was forecast to be a monster storm but I know many people who didn't bother to take really important and highly portable objects like personal documents and photographs because they figured the storm would turn at the last minute or that it wouldn't be a big deal if it hit. Basically, I think nearly everyone was complacent because nothing like Katrina had happened in theirs or their parents lifetimes and they couldn't really grasp why they should be doing more. | [
"Experts using computer modeling at Louisiana State University after Hurricane Katrina have concluded that the levees were never topped but rather faulty design, inadequate construction, or some combination of the two were responsible for the flooding of most of New Orleans: some canal walls leaked underneath, beca... |
How long is a blink? | between 300-400 ms
Scientists have found that the human brain has a talent for ignoring the momentary blackout. The very act of blinking suppresses activity in several areas of the brain responsible for detecting environmental changes, so that you experience the world as continuous. | [
"\"In The Blink of an Eye\" is a Christian rock song with a length of three minutes and sixteen seconds. The song is set in the key of B major and has a tempo of 116 beats per minute, with a vocal range spanning from G-E.\n",
"Blink is a 2003 novel by Christian author Ted Dekker. It was re-released in November 20... |
how does spinning make thread longer than the fibers of the raw material without falling apart when pulled? | It's actually quite amazing, though on the scale you are speaking of it can be easily defunct by some finger work, it's actually all friction. The best way to explain it is to see it. Check out one of the best mythbuster episodes of all time to really understand what I'm talking about. Here's a clip from it -_URL_0_ | [
"Basic spinning of yarn involves taking a clump of fibres and teasing a bit of them out, then twisting it into a basic string shape. You continue pulling and twisting to make it longer and longer, and to control the thickness. Thousands of years ago, people begin doing this onto a stick, called a spindle, which is ... |
what causes a bullet/missile to spin after exiting the rifle? | [That would be because of what is predictably called "rifling".](_URL_0_) There are ridges on the inside of the barrel that dig into the projectile, and they spiral down the length of the barrel which forces the projectile to rotate along with them. This is actually why they are called "rifles" as smooth-bored guns are referred to differently. | [
"BULLET::::- Rifled Traditionally, artillery projectiles have been spin-stabilised, meaning that they spin in flight so that gyroscopic forces prevent them from tumbling. Spin is induced by gun barrels having rifling which engages a soft metal band around the projectile, called a \"driving band\" (UK) or \"rotating... |
the different data plans for mobile networks | Neither AT & T nor Verizon will sell new accounts with unlimited data for smartphones; instead, you pay for a set amount (e.g. 2GB or 5GB), and you pay overages when you surpass that. T-Mobile also keeps track of how much data you have used in a month, but when you go over their limit (5GB, if I'm not mistaken), they slow your connections down, rather than charging you extra money.
Older AT & T accounts still have "unlimited" data on their accounts, but they have started doing the same thing T-Mobile does. I don't think old "unlimited" Verizon accounts have been changed yet, but I could be mistaken.
Of the major four carriers, Sprint is the only one that will sell you a brand new account with truly unlimited service, with full speed no matter how much you use in a month. Unfortunately, depending on where you live, that "full speed" may still be terrible; there are lots of places where Sprint's 3G service is horribly limited and 4G service is nonexistent. I am fortunate enough to live in an area with excellent 4G coverage and 3G towers that work great. Your mileage may vary.
What does this matter to you? Probably nothing. If you're a normal person, you'll never use more than 1-2GB of data in a month, and you won't hit any of these limitations. I consider myself a power-user: I stream Pandora pretty much every time I'm in my car, and I often download extremely large firmware updates over the cell network, and I think the most data I've managed to use was just over 3GB in one single month — I have ended up under 2GB every month but that one. | [
"Most mobile phone data plans have set caps, with any excess paid for per MB (although extra data blocks can be purchased to avoid the expensive casual data pricing). As of 2014, Vodafone claimed its cellular data network is the fastest in the world, with downloads of 5 to 20 Mbit/s on 3G and 20 to 75 Mbit/s on LTE... |
. maybe a dumb question, but why didn't the vietnam war produce terrorists, like conflicts in the middle-east? | Terrorism, particularly international terrorism, doesn't just "happen" and not liking a country is never enough motivation on its own to start. Al Qaeda and other extremest groups of that ilk really have a history of at minimum decades or (depending on where you say it "starts") centuries.
Al Qaeda doesn't just hate the US, they have a vision of a grand pan-Islamic new caliphate. Their strategy has been to find an area with a Muslim population (but not an exclusively Muslim population), destabilize the region and in the chaos come to power using their dedicated and fanatical followers to create an extreme Muslim government. They did this in the former Yugoslavia, they did it in Somalia, they did it in Afghanistan during Soviet occupation, and they tried to do it in the Philippines with a series of attacks most of which we stopped (including the assassination of the pope). "Terrorism" is just a term we have applied to the kind of non-state militias, but they always have a purpose to their actions. It is for the glory of their interpretation of Islam and has the goal of creating a new Muslim caliphate. Al Qaeda litterally means "the base" and that is referencing that it is meant to be the first step in the foundation of a global and unified power.
Vietnam may hate the US, but there is no group like that in Vietnam. The whole war is seen very differently because of the Cold War, but the Vietnam War started the day after the Japanese surrendered in WWII as a war for national independence, not a war against the US.
Ho Chi Minh was not a communist at first but a nationalist. He went to Versailles to plead for independence from France as promised in Wilson's ideal of self-determination, no-one would take a meeting. So when WWII ended, he released a deceleration of independence, declaring Vietnam was no longer a colony but a sovereign nation, invoking Woodrow Wilson, FDR, Thomas Jefferson and the Deceleration of the Rights of Man.
France was not willing to let its colony go and the US sided with it's ally France. Ho Chi Minh started getting aid from the Soviets, but only because the US would not help. Eventually France was defeated (surprise) and the country was divided in two. Ho Chi Minh wanted a unified nation, but the US was willing to defend the south. That's what the Vietnam War was about, we tried to keep Ho Chi Minh isolated to the North, but the Vietnamese people are not really divided north/south. To them it wasn't a defense against communism for the most part (though that did exist and why many Vietnamese immigrants came to the US in the 70s) but about the unification of the country.
Now the country is unified, it's economy is improving rapidly, it is normalizing relations with the world. The US left scars for sure, but there is no reason for the Vietnamese to keep fighting us. The war is over and there is no reason why it should continue. | [
"BULLET::::- The effects of strategic bombing: Most people believed that North Vietnam prized its industrial base so much it would not risk its destruction by U.S. air power and would negotiate peace after experiencing limited bombing. Others saw that, even in World War II, strategic bombing united the victim popul... |
Did Nazi Germany have propaganda cartoons? | E.g. [Der Störenfried](_URL_0_), 1940. Subtle. | [
"The Looney Tunes and Walt Disney Studios used the Nazis as a ploy for their comic characters. However, Disney seemed to concentrate more on the German people within the Nazi Regime, as shown in their 1943 film, \"Der Fuehrers' Face\", starring Donald Duck. Warner Brothers produced a series of propaganda cartoons n... |
Which technologies owe their invention and/or diffusion to the porn industry? | The best source I know of is Jonathan Coopersmith's "[Pornography, Technology, and Progress](_URL_0_)," which covers the diffusion of many technologies, from photography to the internet. His main point is that porn consumers are willing to pay a premium for these services, so they allow the technology to mature and drive down the price for later users.
Probably the best example of this (the article I linked to doesn't have a lot about it, but google should), is the standardization of VHS over Betamax. Betamax didn't have very much porn (because of higher capital costs and Sony's discouragement), but on VHS a large percentage of the original movies were porn. Because porn aficionados flocked to VHS, they gained so much market share they helped drive "regular" consumers away from Beta. | [
"Pornographers have taken advantage of each technological advance in the production and distribution of visual images. Pornography is considered a driving force in the development of technologies from the printing press, through photography (still and motion), to satellite TV, other forms of video, and the Internet... |
why is that sometimes you go into a "stare"; where your eyes fix to a certain place and slowly go out of focus? | It's because focusing your eyes is actually much like flexing two different muscles in sync. It doesn't seem like it because you've been doing it almost every waking moment of your life but a lot goes into focusing your eyes on a point in 3D space.
So when you zone out, you're letting those muscles go slack, for lack of a better term (I'm aware that they're not actually muscles in the strictest sense of the term), giving them a short rest before you go back to near constant exertion. | [
"Changes in spatial attention can occur with the eyes moving, overtly, or with the eyes remaining fixated, covertly. Within the human eye only a small part, the fovea, is able to bring objects into sharp focus. However, it is this high visual acuity that is needed to perform actions such as reading words or recogni... |
Is it true that as much as 2,3% of ships were being sunken by U-boats during the Battle of the Atlantic? | Lets look at the math of the whole thing :
* First of all - that 2.3 % of all ships were lost doesn't mean that 2.3 % of all men on the ships were lost. Plus the rate soon dropped to 1.1 % with the use of bigger convoys.
* Second : The rate is actually not so bad. Look at the number from [Bomber Command](_URL_0_) for example :
> Of every 100 airmen who joined Bomber Command, 45 were killed, 6 were seriously wounded, 8 became Prisoners of War, and only 41 escaped unscathed
About 3.5 Million men served in the british army in WW2. Of those about 385,000 died or were wounded. So thats roughly 12 %
So the rate was much better in the convoys.
* Third : Are you really affected ?
A typical convoy would either take 14 days (if it was a "fast" convoy) or 21 days (if it was a slow convoy).
So assuming that there is no turn around time, no repairs to to be made and no R & R for the crews the maximum number on convoys you can be on in a year is 25 to 17.
But those things existed. Plus crews will be switched out, and so on. So while the ship has a chance of being sunk which was at 1.1 % you as a crew member had an even lower chance of diying cause you were not always on the ship.
So all in all it is a lot less dangerous then it sounds. Especially compared with the other forms of soldiering that were available at the time.
**TL;DR** Its war, people die, the chance to survive as an sailor in the atlantic was actually better then anywhere else. | [
"In 1942 the Allies lost some 8,000,000 tons of shipping, and though they replaced 7,000,000 tons, U-boats still managed to sink 1,160 out of the 1,664 Allied ships lost. Most of these sinkings took place in the mid-Atlantic gap, well within range of long-range Sunderlands and Liberators, only the Command lacked th... |
How was knowledge ‘lost’ after the fall of Rome? | So just looking at western Europe and north Africa (where the empire fell the first and furthest), there are several processes that take place. First, though, it is important to understand what people mean when they say that knowledge was lost. There are basically three things that this can mean. The first is that texts were lost. The ancient world had a lot of authors, a lot of readers, and a lot of books. Many of these were lost. We only have 7 plays by Sophocles, when we know that he wrote many more. Augustine of Hippo writes about the impact that Cicero's "Hortensius" had on him; we have lost that book. Sad! A second type of lost knowledge is practical knowledge of how to do things. In many parts of the empire many sorts of building techniques were forgotten. Many technologies disappeared, or were restricted in their use. Ceramic evidence suggests that in Britain people lost the ability to make fast wheel thrown pottery. The Romans had incredible infrastructure; over the course of the fifth and sixth centuries, many of the aqueducts were abandoned or damaged and never repaired. Church buildings got smaller and, at least in certain regions, the use of freshly cut ashlar masonry disappeared. Finally, knowledge of how to run a state disappeared. The Roman government was highly efficient at doing governmental things, like taking the census and collecting taxes. However, in the post-Roman world government became much simpler, and no longer was based on institutions. The chancery disappeared, and records were no longer kept. Knowledge of how to run a society went away. So basically, we have three types of knowledge: texts and intellectual culture more broadly; specific technologies and craft production techniques; and governmental/institutional know-how. All three went away, to varying degrees, in different places (Britain in the paradigmatic example of a place where there was total collapse; in Italy, there was much less loss; in the East, say, in Constantinople or Alexandria, it's hard to know how much loss there was at all). Each went away for different reasons.
For texts, you have to understand that ancient texts needed to be copied and recopied by hand. There was a transition away from broad literacy and the public consumption of written works and towards a culture of monastic learning that meant that certain types of authors and certain works were more likely to be copied and preserved. We have lots of Church fathers and lots of saints' lives; we have fewer pagan poets. We have Latin comics like Plautus and Petronius because they were thought to preserve important vocabulary for future generations or be good teaching texts for students. We have Virgil for similar reasons. Works that were useless or even worse, perhaps heretical, were not copied. Monastic culture thus both represents a bottleneck for ancient literature and a massve project that saved what we have. Were it not for the monks, we wouldn't have anything surviving in the west. That's because of an overall societal decline in specialization, which is what led to the second type of loss.
Roman civilization was highly specialized. If you were a poor person in northern Italy in the fourth century you could conceivably be eating bread baked from Sicilian grain on red slip ware plates from Tunisia, dipped in fish sauce from Portugal mixed with olive oil from southern Spain (not bad, huh!). Similar situation if you are a soldier on the Rhine or a dockworker in Marseilles or a prostitute in Constantinople. Many people bought clothes on the market or were given clothes woven in the imperial weaving factories by the government. The society was highly specialized with a serious division of labor. As the empire broke down the economy simplified and localized, and in many regions people had to start doing things on their own again, and basically couldn't. There wasn't anyone left who knew how to make concrete or whatever, and no one had the technological know how to make slipware dishes. (A side note: in this period, certain technologies actually spread, such as the heavy plow, which seems to have spread with the decline of ancient slavery, although this is controversial).
Finally, institutions. The Roman Empire was a highly literate, legalistic, lawsuit happy, tax-gathering state (like us!). Once the tax system begins to go, so do the institutions that allow it to exist. The bureaucracy dies, and with it the need for records. With the end of records, lawsuits become more about personal relations and eyewitness testimony and less about being able to access documents. With the end of tax gathering all government institutions go away and are replaced by localized landlord-tenant relationships. With the exception of the church, no one in the West really knows how governments work or what they are supposed to do. No one draws salaries any more.
Anyway, that's pretty schematic. I also fall pretty far on the doom and gloom, everything was a disaster side of the scale. Many others actually think that very little was lost. They are wrong. Here are some good books, going from the more specific to the less specific. Not all of them agree with me, or with each other, but all are good.
General (Brown and Ward-Perkins are the extremes of continuity vs collapse, read both to get a good balance):
Brown, Peter. The world of late antiquity. London: Thames and Hudson, 1971
Ward-Perkins, Bryan, The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization (Oxford, 2005)
Fleming, Robin. Britain After Rome. New York: Penguin, 2010.
Pirenne, Henri. Mohammed and Charlemagne. New York: Norton, 1939.
About books and education, and monks:
Levison, Wilhelm. England and the Continent in the Eighth Century. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1946
Cavallo, G. and R. Chartier, ed. A history of reading in the West. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003.
Cavallo, G. 1978. "La circolazione libraria nell'età di Giustiniano." In G. G. Archi (ed.), L'imperatore Giustiniano. Storia e mito, 201-236. Milano : A. Giuffrè, 1978
Riché, Pierre. Éducation et culture dans l'Occident barbare, VIe-VIIIe siècles, 3rd edn. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1973. (I believe there is an English translation of at least part of this)
About institutions:
Brown, Warren, et al., eds. Documentary Culture and the Laity in the Early Middle Ages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
Classen, P. Kaiserreskript und Königsurkunde: Diplomatische Studien zum Problem der Kontinuität zwischen Altertum und Mittelalter. Thessalonica, 1977.
About technology:
Henning, J. "Revolution or relapse? Technology, agriculture and early medieval archaeology in Germanic Central Europe." In The Langobards before the Frankish conquest: an ethnographic perspective, eds. Giorgio Ausenda, et al., 149-64;165-73. Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2009 | [
"Losses of ancient writings occurred in the Old World, including as a result of deliberate or accidental fires, wars, earthquakes, and floods. Similar losses occurred in the New World. Much of the literature of the pre-Columbian Maya was destroyed during the Spanish conquest in the 16th century. On this point, Mich... |
have we been able to find the center of the universe mathematically? | We don't know if the universe has a center because we don't know if the universe has edges or if it goes on forever.
What we do know is that the observable universe, which is the part of the universe that we can see, looks pretty much the same everywhere in the sense that it has much of the same things that behave in much of the same way.
If the universe is infinite, meaning it goes on forever in all directions, it would not have a center. If it has some type of shape, it might have a center but not necessarily.
If it has finite mass, which is a limit amount of mass, then it does have a center of mass and a center of gravity.
If it does have boundaries then we are tasked with the question of what the nature of those boundaries are. I imagine they might be imperceivable to us. In fact I personally think that might be the case.
| [
"Fuller wrote that the natural analytic geometry of the universe was based on arrays of tetrahedra. He developed this in several ways, from the close-packing of spheres and the number of compressive or tensile members required to stabilize an object in space. One confirming result was that the strongest possible ho... |
OK Reddit, can someone please explain to me the idea of someone's 'reaction time'? | Everyone brain processes information at different speeds. The signal of seeing the ruler drop has to go through many parts of the brain. | [
"Reaction time (\"RT\") is the time that elapses between a person being presented with a stimulus and the person initiating a motor response to the stimulus. It is usually on the order of 200 ms. The processes that occur during this brief time enable the brain to perceive the surrounding environment, identify an ob... |
where does the term "in-law" come from? | Marriage is a legal construct: when you are wed, you are bound to another person and their family legally. For a very long time, marriage was about the consolidation of wealth and property more than romantic notions of couplehood. So the family of your betrothed become your family, not in blood, but legally... your mother “in law” but not in blood, etc. | [
"The Law From Old English \"lagu\" (something laid down or fixed) (); \"legal\" comes from Latin \"legalis\", from \"lex\" \"law,\" \"statute\" () is a system of rules usually enforced through a set of institutions. The purpose of law is to provide an objective set of rules for governing conduct and maintaining ord... |
What happens on an atomic scale when water is boiled? | Your biology professor is incorrect. There is no chemical change in the water. The H2O does not split into H2 and O2.
You have been taught correctly, that water vapor is gaseous water.
For your hypothetical, if you *did* have H2 and O2 gas, they wouldn't necessarily explode unless you have an ignition source at a temperature above the flash point (so, a gas stove). Alternately, they will spontaneously combust if they are heated above the autoignition temperature of hydrogen (~500°C). | [
"\"Nucleate boiling\" is characterized by the growth of bubbles or pops on a heated surface, which rises from discrete points on a surface, whose temperature is only slightly above the liquids. In general, the number of nucleation sites are increased by an increasing surface temperature.\n",
"Some science suggest... |
What's the likelihood that the legacy of King Richard III was mostly Tudor propaganda to secure their claim to the English Throne? | The problem is that the majority of the contemporary and near-contemporary documents about him are all likely to contain some bias. Shakespeare's play is obviously pro-Henry VII, since he's writing at a time when Henry's grand-daughter is on the throne. Shakespeare's Richard III is slightly less obviously suck-up propaganda than his Henry VIII, but when you read the play it's pretty clearly written to make Richard look like a bad guy so that the usurpation by Henry VII is less usurpation by someone with a big army and a tenuous claim and more "victory over a tyrant".
Josephine Tey's book "Daughter of Time" is a famous attempt to reclaim Richard as a good guy, but a lot of her evidence also comes from sources inclined to be biased. The Richard III Society is all over these documents, too. However, the contemporary sources from Richard's reign that talk about how awesome he is (from the North of England) are, hello, written at the time he is not only king of the entire country, but also feudal lord of the places the reports are coming from. You don't get a lot of documents saying "hey, the guy who has a lot of power over us is an asshole, and we don't care who knows it".
As far as the killing of the princes in the tower is concerned, there are lots of theories. Current historians (like the ones quoted in the news yesterday and today) appear to be tending towards "yeah, he did it, but anyone would have in that situation". | [
"Many historians conclude that Richard III is the likeliest candidate for the disappearance of the princes for a number of reasons. Although the princes had been eliminated from the succession, Richard's hold on the monarchy was very insecure due to the way in which he had attained the crown, leading to a backlash ... |
Are there any gases that can conduct eletricity? | They all do. The voltage just needs to be strong enough to overcome the dielectric between the terminals.
Some of them just do it better than others. Are you familiar with neon lighting? _URL_0_ | [
"Enthalpy of ideal gases and incompressible solids and liquids does not depend on pressure, unlike entropy and Gibbs energy. Real materials at common temperatures and pressures usually closely approximate this behavior, which greatly simplifies enthalpy calculation and use in practical designs and analyses.\n",
"... |
Is there any validity to the claim that Epsom salts "Increase the relaxing effects of a warm bath after strenuous exertion"? If so, what is the Underlying mechanism for this effect? | Probably not the primary benefit that epsom salts claim, but dissolving salts in water (or solutes into any solvent) makes the solution denser. So you're going to float slightly easier in an epsom salt batch than a normal one. Whether this makes any difference physiologically I have no idea.
edit: The amount of people that made it through school without learning what a salt is is depressing me. Yes, epsom salts are salts. They are primarily a salt of magnesium, magnesium sulfate, just like table salt is a salt of sodium, sodium chloride. | [
"A technique growing in popularity is flotation therapy, which is the use of a float tank in which a solution of Epsom salt is kept at skin temperature to provide effortless floating. Research in USA and Sweden has demonstrated a powerful and profound relaxation after twenty minutes. In some cases, floating may red... |
why doesnt the world appear 2d if i close one eye? | It does appear in 2d. However your brain is good at recreating the 3rd dimension by calculating parallax as you change position, as well as monitoring and comparing changes in known sizes of things. | [
"To avoid eyestrain and distortion, each of the two 2D images should be presented to the viewer so that any object at infinite distance is perceived by the eye as being straight ahead, the viewer's eyes being neither crossed nor diverging. When the picture contains no object at infinite distance, such as a horizon ... |
why is two-x chromosomes a default sub? | The default subs are based on popularity, which is based on how many members they have and how many people view them. They just happen to be the most popular subs, for whatever reason. | [
"The X chromosome is one of the two sex-determining chromosomes (allosomes) in many organisms, including mammals (the other is the Y chromosome), and is found in both males and females. It is a part of the XY sex-determination system and X0 sex-determination system. The X chromosome was named for its unique propert... |
how long could an umbilical cord stay attached and would it give any benefits? | The umbilical cord should fall off after about 1-3 weeks. If it doesn't, it could be a sign of infection or an immune system disorder. This is because the baby's body has a white blood cell called a neutrophil whose job is cut off the umbilical cord so it falls off. If there is an immune system problem, there are no neutrophils to cut off the umbilical cord. If there is an infection, the neutrophils are busy fighting the bacteria and don't have time to cut off the umbilical cord.
There are no benefits to the umbilical cord in a baby after birth. The whole point was to transfer food and oxygen from the mother to the baby while it was in the womb. Once it can eat food and breathe on its own, the umbilical cord doesn't do anything anymore. | [
"The cord can be clamped at different times; however delaying the clamping of the umbilical cord until at least one minute after birth improves outcomes as long as there is the ability to treat the small risk of jaundice if it occurs. Clamping is followed by cutting of the cord, which is painless due to the absence... |
what are the dark bruises under a person's eyes that appears when they're tired? | When you're tired, the body releases a hormone called cortisol to boost energy levels, cortisol increases blood flow in the body.
The skin around a persons eye is a lot thinner than the rest of the body, so all the dark patches are is the blood vessels showing underneath the skin. It is more noticeable when tired due to the extra blood flow (vessels expand) | [
"Bruises often induce pain immediately after the trauma that results in their formation, but small bruises are not normally dangerous alone. Sometimes bruises can be serious, leading to other more life-threatening forms of hematoma, such as when associated with serious injuries, including fractures and more severe ... |
Why do food labels say you shouldn't microwave raw chicken? | Microwave ovens don't heat very evenly, as anyone who has tried to eat a Hot Pocket can tell you. So when microwaving a large piece of chicken, there is a fairly high chance that spots within the chicken will be undercooked, and therefore at a higher risk of spreading food-borne illness. Regular ovens heat uniformly and provide a much more predictable method of heating the meat all the way through.
That said, there are a few ways around this. Small pieces of chicken (less than 1") are more likely to cook evenly. You can also use a second heating medium by using a microwave steamer (reusable, or the disposable bags) to steam the chicken inside the oven. This provides an external heat source to help even out the heat transmission into the chicken, rather than relying on inconsistent internal heating. | [
"This subdivision does not include foods containing raw eggs, fish, meat, or poultry that require cooking by the consumer as recommended by the Food and Drug Administration to prevent food borne illnesses.\n",
"A 2012 chicken meat study found 60% of home cooks were at risk of food poisoning by washing whole poult... |
Anti-Semitism in 1942-1945 Nazi Germany Propaganda | Modified from an [earlier answer of mine](_URL_0_)
> Enjoy the war, for the peace is going to be terrible- popular German joke in the last year of the war
As the fortunes of war turned against Germany after the Battle of Stalingrad, German propaganda found an imperative need to readjust to this new reality. Prior to the military reversals of 1942, German propaganda had operated on the principle of presenting an "ersatz reality," wherein the state-dominated media maximized Germany's victories and ignored the salient reality that Germany's war was not a short one and her enemies persisted in fighting Germany. The scale of defeats like Stalingrad, the growing Allied bombers, and the surrender of German forces in North Africa pricked this media bubble and German propaganda organs responded accordingly.
This retooling of the Third Reich's propaganda apparatus in light of defeat pursued several seemingly counter-intuitive strategies. For one thing, despite the fact that the Third Reich was a personalist dictatorship *par excellence*, the figure of Hitler disappeared from German propaganda. In contrast to propaganda from the earlier years of victory, post-Stalingrad news of German military operations seldom invoked Hitler's name or connected him too heavily to military operations. This was part of a deliberate strategy on Goebbels's part as he recognized connecting Hitler too intimately to Germany's military fortunes made him, and by extension, the legitimacy of the entire regime, culpable when these operations did not bear fruit. Rather than present images of the Führer, Hitler was invoked in late war propaganda as an abstract figure that stood for all Germans. This could just be from invoking his title, or oblique historical analogies such as films that made apparent the connection between Hitler and historical personages like Frederick the Great. Hitler, whose visage was omnipresent in state propaganda between 1933-1941, became an abstraction. By the same token, German propaganda also emphasized the severity and violence of German military setbacks, but with a unique spin. Allied bombing, the Soviet massacres of Polish officers at Katyn, and other actions of the Allies became staples of German propaganda after the tide had turned as it showed that Germany's enemies were merciless. This [poster](_URL_2_) of the Katyn massacre does not shy away from either blood or the gruesome faces of the NKVD officers. The idea behind this emphasis upon the Allies' purported barbarity was to bind the Germans together through a policy of "strength through terror." This dehumanization of the Allies' military underscored that no compromise was possible and this was a war in which there was to be no quarter given and none expected.
These new strategies often dovetailed with established propaganda discourses that had been present within the Third Reich since 1933. The regime's castigation of the so-called "November Criminals" of 1918 also found new currency in this environment. Interrogations of German troops captured after 20 July 1944 often reported back that one key motivation for fighting on was to prevent a repeat of Germany's humiliating defeat at the end of the First World War. One important component of the demonization of the Allied military was that German retribution was in the making. Since 1933, one of the central legitimizing planks of the NSDAP was that it had enabled German technology and genius. The vaunted V-weapons tapped into this established narrative that German technical expertise brooked no rivals. But beyond rockets and other *Wunderwaffen*, National Socialism had always stressed the ability of the will to transcend any material obstacles. This propaganda's emphasis upon collective action in the face of numerical superiority fed into this notion that the will is superior to rational logic. Similarly, the destruction of German landmarks and the seemingly indiscriminate nature of Allied bombing heightened the sense that this was a cultural war and that the Germanic culture constantly trumpeted by the Third Reich was in existential danger.
One sinister aspect of the late war propaganda was its turn to a heightened antisemitism. Goebbels used the solidarity of Allied coalition of both the imperial Britain, hypercapitalist United States, and the Bolshevik USSR as evidence of grand global Jewish conspiracy against Germany. This [infamous poster](_URL_1_) was only one example of this propaganda line that a single Jewish force was holding together a coalition against Germany. Victor Klemperer in his diaries would note the increasingly shrill antisemitism in propaganda as Germany's fortunes waned. The widespread knowledge about the Holocaust amongst the German public imparted a weight to this propaganda that it might not have otherwise possessed. Although they might not have known the specifics of the Holocaust, most Germans were aware that something quite terrible had happened to the Jews in the East. Even though the antisemitism was troweled on so thick to strain credibility in this propaganda, it encouraged the expectation that the Allies would hold Germany collectively responsible for the mass murder of the Jews. This does not mean that the German public accepted the NSDAP and Propaganda Ministry's antisemitism wholesale, but in some cases Germans interpreted antisemitism quite differently than the state. One popular rumor among German civilians in 1943/4 was that Hungary had not been the target of any Allied bombings was because the Hungarian government had spared its Jews. The SD recorded a number of complaints that because the Horthy government has ghettoized Jews in Budapest the Allies would not attack this human shield, and there was grumbling within the German populace that Hitler did not do the same for cities like Berlin or Hamburg. And some of this disgruntlement was not clandestine, but took the form of direct petitions to Goebbels. There were a string of letters to the Propaganda Ministry after the mass operations to clear Hungary's Jews in 1944 demanding that they be used as human hostages against Allied bombing. But the general acceptance of some of the antisemitism produced by Goebbels's machine precluded thought of or even the possibility of a negotiated peace for much of the German public. News of the Morgenthau Plan, which would have deindustrialized Germany, the expansion of Allied bombing, and the scale of German reverses fostered a general expectation of a Carthaginian peace.
The effectiveness of this late-war propaganda is open to interpretation. While it could not rekindle hope in final victory, it did strengthen the resolve of some Germans to see the war to its bitter conclusion. Yet, even as propaganda turned to negative integration (uniting around a threat), it could not arrest the gradual estrangement of much of the German public to the National Socialist state. Goebbels himself appreciated this sentiment and his famous February 1943 *Sportpalast* speech had veiled threats against the "Golden Pheasants" of the NSDAP who were thus far still enjoying a prewar lifestyle. This late-war propaganda often worked in conjunction with greater arbitrary state violence directed against Germans, especially after the 20 July plot. The propaganda drive for mass action and a collective response to Allied aggression heightened the sense of social anomie and the breakdown of society that came as bombing and wartime pressures destroyed the German infrastructure and stretched the civilian domestic economy well past its breaking point. The final agonies of the last few months of the war, as well as the violence meted out to Germans that shirked in their duties, helped to cement the postwar myth that Germans were double victims of the war- who were both subject to extreme violence from their military enemies, but also brutalized by a hypocritical criminal regime.
*Sources*
Kershaw, Ian. *The 'Hitler Myth': Image and Reality in the Third Reich*. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.
_. *The End: The Defiance and Destruction of Hitler's Germany, 1944-1945*. New York: Penguin Press, 2011.
Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt. *Germany and the Second World War, Volume IX/1: German Wartime Society- Politicization, Disintegration, and the Struggle for Survival* Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2008.
_.*Germany and the Second World War, Volume IX/2: German Wartime Society- Exploitation, Interpretation, Exclusion* Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2014. | [
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